Entrepreneurship

If you knew me a tiny bit, you could probably say that I don't yield to facility. Sometimes (often, actually), I wonder whether I should rather acknowledge I don't easily yield to reason. Take this: when I first visited my father's country 30 years ago, I fell in love with what I discovered and decided Africa was the continent where I would live when I grew up. Well, I did grow up and since 2000, I have been trying to make this dream come true.

You would think that fulfilling a child's dream means living happy ever after. Forget it. I find it mightily difficult to function here. Not moving to Africa as an employee or even a volunteer, with a company or a NGO having paved the way for me and providing a safety net in case any problems arise, means that I often come head-on with any type and amount of issues, and that I have to face them alone: I decided to create a company which, in itself, is a challenge, wherever you do it.

Doing business in Africa is a whole different world. You encounter ways of doing things you weren't prepared to face and which, frankly speaking, seem very odd at times. It is likely that I made a lot of mistakes, some of which I am probably not even aware of. I know I keep blundering again and again.

Let's face it: when you come from Europe or North America to set up a company, chances are that those you will meet in the process (officials, partners, employees, etc.) will take it for granted that you have come to take advantage of a cheap and pliable labour and make a lot of money on their backs. If it is not your case, it will take a lot of time (if not forever) to overcome some of those people's prejudices.

The blame is not all theirs: most people won't consider expatriating unless they can make a bundle in the process. Well, being an utopian, I went with quite a different agenda. I intended to give work to young African graduates and help them make a transition, as smooth as possible, between their formal training and the international markets at large. Because I tested dozens of candidates, literally from Tangiers, Morocco, to Cape Town, South Africa, I knew there was quite a gap, which I set out to bridge. It was at the same time a training programme and a job that I wanted to offer.

2.5 years later, I can say I haven't made a bundle, quite the contrary. I'm not surprised, it was not my aim. Of course, it would have been nice to do good and get rich at the same time, but not very realistic. I spent the first 18 months sleeping between 2 and 5 hours a night only, because of the staggering amount of work involved when you want both to help people increase their skills and have a usable output to deliver to your international clients (who have no idea of your dreams or circumstances).

A lot of what you are going to read in this blog will tell you about my professional experience of the last 2.5 years and nice (and less nice) asides. Why am I doing this? To warn the utopians that reality is not always rosy? I knew it wasn't and it didn't deter me. To let off steam now and then? Probably. To stop boring my friends to tears with accounts of my trials? Possibly.