Shownotes: 

👉🏾 How many of you know that Africa is home to approximately one third of the world’s languages? 

👉🏾 That there are at least 75 languages in Africa which have more than one million speakers

👉🏾 That it has a combined landmass of China, US, India, Japan and much of Europe (11.7 million sq mi)? 

👉🏾 Considering its size, demographic dividend, economic potential, achievements , we know that it does not have the voice or representation that it deserves on all matters, including climate change, SDGs or within global media etc. 

👉🏾 Through sheer ignorance and stereotyping most of us continue to use Africa synonymously with a country in Africa? It is 54 distinct countries, that are diverse culturally and geographically

👉🏾 The reality is that Africa is not a monolith. That even Francophone Africa is not one homogenous group

👉🏾 Covid has impacted countries on the continent in different ways. And countries and communities are still trying to figure out what back to normal, or life/work in a post pandemic world would look like

👉🏾 One thing is clear - work from home is not necessarily a thing

The unpalatable truth is that perhaps it works for outsiders to continue to perpetuate the narrative on Africa, to undervalue the expertise/skills of professionals from the continent. The expectation remains that outsiders define strategy and locals just implement and experts/consultants, businesses from the continent charge less for work similar to other markets

Last month, I spoke with Kwame Senou, about the need for education and cultural awareness if businesses are to succeed in the African continent. We spoke about his journey, future trends, what brands could do to take advantage of the opportunities in Africa and much more…..

Listen here….

Memorable passages from the podcast

👉🏾Thank you Sudha for inviting me. It's a real pleasure. 

👉🏾 I was born in West Africa in Benin Republic right beside Nigeria. And I grew up in a multicultural family where my dad shared some Ghanaian origin with Benin and my mom being from Benin. And I have two brothers and two sisters, so it was quite a big family. I went to public school, I'm always proud to say that because public education is now kind of synonymous of not being a very good quality. But I went to public school and then after doing science in high school I moved to university where I took law degree. 

👉🏾 And after a while doing world law, that's where I got hooked into the communication through journalism, initially the university, and then in a private publication. Being always adventurous and curious. I was always interested in discovering, so I started travelling with my parents. We lived in different part of the country. 

👉🏾 And what people always realise about Africa is that South, for instance, is coastal, and the north is almost xxxxxx or desertic a bit arid. People speak different languages, so it's a whole difference. And I remember my first trip to the north of the country, it was in a train, and it was a good experience as the train was moving forward, I was learning more about the country I belong to and the people. In most parts of the world, train stations are like shopping malls and you can see different things being sold in each city and how different they were. And how agriculture is a very important part of the daily lives in Africa. 

👉🏾 Having this diverse background, I think I quickly started opening up to the Anglophone words while I was educated in French. And I was reading things from Ghana, things from Nigeria and it quickly shaped me into how I describe myself today.

👉🏾 Born in Africa and World Citizen. And beside my job as a journalist, I started working in a bank and my boss who was a Nigerian lady, gave me a book. And I know today it is dangerous to say you have been inspired by Donald Trump, but back then it was a book by Donald Trump called Think Big and Kickass.

👉🏾 But I mean, he changed the title to Think Big and Make It Happen. But this book really reshaped my focus around thinking big and thinking beyond what I know what I take for granted 

👉🏾 And she gave me a second book. The second book was Dream from my Father of Barack Obama. So it was a really through the lady, got influenced by the English speaking world while having a French education, having learned French history, french philosophy and French way of thinking. And I think the nuances from both side helped me really better myself. 

👉🏾 I would define myself as a communication strategist. In Africa it's very difficult to be a specialist, like someone from the UK will tell me, "oh, I do health comms, work in financial comms cetera. But I will define myself as a comms strategist having worked across different type of clients; whether it's government, non-profit, private organisation, association, special interest group, individuals.

👉🏾 And I will just give you an example to tell you how I love my work. You know, During Covid a good friend of mine, and a client became the mayor of the third city in our country. And in my home country, because I live in Cote D'Ivoire and I'm from Benin Republic. And remember then Covid happened, nobody knew how to react and everything was very centralised, government were ever powerful. And we had a conversation, you are a mayor. How can you make a positive change quickly? And out of that brainstorming came the idea of trying to influence government and financial partners of the country into supporting directly the community.

👉🏾 Because remember the response was everywhere, it was national. So he drafted an op-ed, read and reread, it so as a political space. He was just becoming a mayor, he didn't want to create any wrong perception.

👉🏾 And we published it and I can tell you that within one month the phones were made available. I think his community got something like a hundred thousand US dollar. But all the communities in the country got over 1.5 million dollars, and they could effect change directly in the communities where it was needed the most because government were more busy buying mask, buying ventilators and all that, when people were deprived of their livelihood. 

👉🏾 And it appeared to me that it's what I love about this job, the ability to impact, to impact positively. And it can translate quite effectively in such case. Sometime it takes longer, but at the end of the day PR and communication have been responsible of some of the most positive change we can see in the world and I expect PR to still drive this change, especially for my continent, Africa.

👉🏾 Yes. I think the first challenge, and I'm sure everybody who's worked on the global stage faced it, is the challenge for most people to adapt to different environments. I am fortunate not to have this challenge. If you see me walking in the street of New York or in the hotel of Lagos, I'll quickly adapt. Sometime I even adopt the local slang, I'm just coming back from Morocco and I was greeting people in Arabic and they were all amazed like how this guy is able to do that. 

👉🏾 But yes the challenge is there is a kind of refusal of adaptation. People are not interested in that, they would claim they want to work in a multicultural world, they want to learn, but they are not really interested, those are just empty words. They don't want to understand the differences. Like, PR is not the same. I mean, the media landscape is not the same. So there are so many changes that I believe before starting anybody should first educate him or herself on what is going on locally, rather than trying to import directly. 

👉🏾 The second challenge is obviously language. In Africa, I mean, I'm based in Abidjan where we speak French. And a lot of my requests are in English, or sometime even other languages, like people from Vietnam that I worked with it once. And they don't understand French. They don't seem to understand that there are nuances that English cannot carry into French. So it's always a challenge. 

👉🏾 And the third and the most painful is this perception of Africa. I think decades of media brainwashing, and I don't blame the media, they kind of serve global geopolitical interest and all that, but they've brainwashed people into thinking that, there's so little good out of Africa, and that little good is only music, you know? I joke usually saying that when you are an African, a black guy, and you're not are not having dreadlocks on your head and you're not singing, you don't have tattoo on your body, you kind look alien when you travel outside the continent, people don't know what to exactly do of you because they're so used to framing you in that category.

👉🏾 But again, and to your point, education is the key. And I don't think blaming people, fighting them complaining is the solution, it's education. And a lot of us are now realising that patience is also part of that education process. So what we do is that the first time we engage with a client, if they accept of course, some don't have time for that, but we take them through an understanding of the continent, how it is different, we call it Africa briefing. An understanding of the continent, it's geography, it's history, the languages, how people are different. 

👉🏾 And let me just give you another example, yesterday I was talking to a client and I was telling him the president is going to be at this event and I think it would make sense that you send someone senior to attend this event because, this president we call it in French, xxxxxxx like kind an influential figure in the region.

👉🏾 And he wouldn't be happy to be dealing only with a local MD or this sort of thing. And this is the kinda small details that make the difference in government relation. And I believe it's the same in the US, you won't expect the ministry of transportation of one country to travel to Washington be received by Joe Biden. It apply everywhere, but people tend to believe that because it's Africa, it's substandard, we should accept that. So we have to educate, and that is really about bringing more African voices out, bringing more information, bringing more publication. And I encourage my team, I challenge myself to write books from 2023, because we need more publication and more voices from Africa talking about African things.

👉🏾 And I am among those people, we are tired of the African experts who desperately don't look African. And despite 10, 20, 30 years of academic studies, there are things that you can only understand when you were born in and you really understand the language.

👉🏾 Thank you for raising this point, and it's given me an opportunity to talk about it and I hope we can have more discussion in organisation like PRCA or CIPR around it. You are very right. This is all part of the global perception of Africa. Africa is substandard, Africa is cheap. People don't need much in Africa which is wrong. Africa, cost of operation for any B2B services provider is higher in Africa than it is in the UK. Travelling between, I mean, Abidjan, if I have to go and deal with a matter in Guinea, it'll cost me $500 or $600, like an economy ticket. That is just one hour and a half from here.

But I think it's also part of keeping the money outside Africa. They have report from measures about cost of living in Africa and all that, and they know the numbers, but they just want to keep the money where they think it's belong. It also have to do with capital, whoever owns the company wants to keep the maximum for him. 

👉🏾 But how can we start educating clients? I think the work start at home. Let our partner agencies, the networks we are part of, start treating us with respect and making sure that when they're talking to the client, they do not expect the client to see Africa as substandard. And again, to this point you can look at when foreign experts travel to Africa, they are paid even more than they can expect in the US. We've seen so many situations where after working in Africa for five years, experts are no longer happy to go back because they're going to get the big house with the garden, the Jeep from Toyota and so many packages. The children, school fees, the insurers, the life insurance and all that. 

👉🏾 It's actually cheaper to employ an African who is here based here than to bring a foreign expert but they still do that, they pay them decently. So they realise that working in Africa is not cheaper. But working in Africa by Africans should be cheaper, it shouldn't be the case, it's wrong and I think it starts within US agencies when we are making quotes, when we are sending financial proposal, we should really be specific about, we treat everybody equally. If we are billing hours, let the rate be the same for everyone. If we are billing overhead, let's make sure that we listen to the African agencies. Because clients are going to anyway pay. Second and I want to take some ownership on that, we also on the continent should work engage, lobby to show people numbers, data. Not only complain, because sometime I feel we also complained too much without providing data.

👉🏾 And this is a job to be done. We should show clients how an operation look like on the continent. Like, I was talking to a friend in the US and she was like, why do you have to do all this for an event? And I'm like, the hotel doesn't offer that service. I have to bring everything, the sound system, the video guy, everything I have to do. So you can understand that I will bill more hours than someone in the US who can just sign a contract with the hotel and the hotel take care of everything in the background.

👉🏾 And again, it comes to what you mentioned before, education. We need to start providing data to people outside the continent. And I'm very happy of the work PRCA Africa is doing in showing the state of the industry. We should also start thinking of how to show clients what is cost of operation, how business is conducted, how much it cost to run a successful campaign and all that. So that they understand and they grow in that direction.

👉🏾 I mean, I would say nine and nine and a half. Because we tend to live in this single village now. You can wake up in Africa and know exactly what's happening at the G20 summit in Indonesia. I think I'm part of that last generation who was not too connected. When I was a young kid, we only got news from the radio and the TV news was very short. It was 1:00 PM at midday and 8:00 PM in the evening, and that's all. And it was 30 minutes. But today through internet, we can know what is happening everywhere.

👉🏾 Like yesterday I receive a storm alert in Chicago because my cousin is living there. And this makes you deal, contact, engage with people from all over the world. So the first skill I believe is cultural intelligence. How do I engage with the Japanese? How different is an Indian who is living in the UK, because it's not the same with an Indian who is based in India. How people in Latin America see things like respect, how do you address them? How do I switch from a country like Benin where you can't be too friendly, you can't be too forward with people to a country like Côte d'Ivoire. You know, in French, we have a difference between using the second person of singular or using the second person of plural as a sign of respect.

👉🏾 So how do you switch between those nuances? How do I engage with someone who thinks in Swahili but then speaks English, and different background, different people, so different expectation. And when you are not culturally intelligent, it's become challenging to work. Because even here in West Africa, we see Indian in company, Americans in company, Italian Japanese, Chinese, everywhere.

👉🏾 And I think what we leaders need to do generally is to be more humble. I always say that the danger of leadership is that you reach leadership positions usually after some accomplishment, and it can give you a sense of self-worth that can be dangerous in accepting others and their differences. And this culture of humility, this culture of willingness to learn would really help into making cultural intelligence a common skill. 

👉🏾 How do I discuss climate change from London to São Tomé, an island of the coast of Africa. It's really important, because we are going to advise clients who usually rely on us for this cultural intelligence, they actually need us to provide the information. So I feel it is really one of the area we should dedicate education.

👉🏾 And I want to talk about the work done by Robyn de Villiers, who is the chair of BCW Africa. She started educating people on the culture map. And I was really impressed listening to her mentioning how people are not really aware and it creates conflict and cultural intelligence as a tool to prevent conflict. Yes. I always smile about this particular question of future of work and hybrid and all that, because in Africa, while a lot of people who just push this narrative, but the situation is quite simple.

👉🏾 If you look at social survey in Africa, what you realise this job is still the number one problem in Africa. And we have a population on average below the age of 35, which is 75%. These people need a job, they need a job and they don't even have a demand. They just want to get work. What we saw with Covid is that of course there was this time between March and July 2020, where everybody had to kind of use a dual hybrid mode. But what I am seeing increasingly is that everybody's going back to work fully for those who are working. But let talk to you about something different that happened.

👉🏾 What happened with Covid is actually that it opened job possibilities to people in Africa on the global market. In Nigeria, there are graphic designer, web designers, developers, IT engineer that are now operating remote for company in the UK, in the US. So because remote work was now possible in so many organisation, in Europe or in the US.

👉🏾 So many African talent could apply for job and even get them and live off it. What is less told also is that even us on the continent, I have five people on full remote. COVID helped me being attractive to them as a company. So they...