Low-paying jobs should only be given to non-graduates from humble rural areas, or to top university students on holiday.

Link below:
http://www.kenyanentrepreneur......ent-104486

Expansion: right now we are in Ghana and Burkina Faso. We have a toe in the water in Kenya and Angola, potentially Benin by the end of the year. Basically we intend to go continent wide through third party seller agreements.

Will send an email.

So, tell me about the consumer market in Ghana and where you see your business expanding to within that African region.

I suppose when I read your viewpoints you remind me of a guy like Alieu Conteh, the Gambian entrepreneur who built a mobile phone company in the Congo, right in the middle of that country’s civil war.

According to this article below, Conteh’s company now has 3 million customers and is valued at $1.6 billion. So, it can be done, even against great odds:

Link to story on Conteh: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/.....es-in-drc/

**btw – send me an email @kenyanentrepreneur@gmail.com. I’d like to talk to you about the company you are trying to set up down there.

Jellyfish:
I don’t think I’m being patronizing. I do like to ask hard hitting questions and I have found that most of the people I’ve interviewed don’t mind those hard hitting questions. To really get to the meat of how they formed these companies, you have to ask these questions. You can’t just throw up a bunch of fluff questions because you’ll end up with a boring story that has no substance.

And I have another piece coming up on a Kenyan entrepreneur who has become a power seller on ebay. So, I believe that I am really making an effort to find these Kenyan entrepreneurs and to tell their stories, but like I’ve said before, I do my homework and I’m not going to waste my time talking to people who are making money through political connections. I’m not going to waste time talking to the founders of Equity bank or Transcentury or to someone like Biwott or Gideon Moi.

I’m also not going to be like the other Kenyan business blogs, which just throw up a bunch of numbers about these multinational companies and call that business reporting. e.g. Barclays’ banks earnings are down 15% or Kengen’s bond has raised 10billion shillings; blah, blah, blah.

I want to find out about the personal journey’s of these entrepreneurs and in order to do that I have to extract these answers out of them.

Again I look at this from an entrepreneurs perspective, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush plus others have made a killing opting for the first rather than the second so why dither?

There is no doubt that the Asian examples have shown the transformative power of building domestic purchasing power on the back of servicing external demand however that window of opportunity is very finite as the current global economic meltdown has shown. And in Africa’s case there has been an OVER-EMPHASIS on catering to external demand albeit with very little productivity and hence nothing to show for it and VERY LITTLE to ZERO emphasis on domestic demand. And since I am one of those who do not believe in waiting for a conducive political and economic environment to emerge, I follow Donald Rumsfeld’s advice ‘you go to war with the army you have not the one you want.’

Your basic premise is that Kenyans have low purchasing power, my point is that clearly industries and sectors like telecommunications have thrived based on a low per capita purchasing power but a broad and deep penetration that results in billions of dollars.
Hence my point focus on the low per capita purchasing power but broad depth in terms of market penetration since this has already proven to be a viable and sustainable economic model.

Your other point is important i.e. increasing productivity or in plain english ensuring people have jobs so that they can afford to buy things.

I look at this from an entrepreneurs standpoint and not from a broader macro-economic context which perhaps is warranted.

My point remains the same, there is plenty of money to be made based on the existing purchasing power of poor Kenyans. Those who are very successful in Africa have figured out how to exploit the paradox of the market i.e. selling goods and services to millions of poor people. From a broader macroeconomic context I still believe the silver bullet remains building a domestic economy based on domestic supply and demand…….cater to the existing demand which is under exploited and then work on the supply which I agree probably means getting the most amount of people employed through means such as orientation towards exports. I just don’t believe the latter is a pre-condition as you do.

KE, kenyans spending power is low, but its not all Kenyans who cannot spend and for most the situation is reversible. Its all a matter of lack of knowledge and finance e.g I have seen mama’s who could not feed their children move to being able to not only feed but also educate and build comfortable housing, this is mainly facilitated by microfinance institutions that guides and teaches them on saving, spending and moving foward. it can be done.

Secondly, when you think “there is no spending power so we cannot sell to the local market” you are limiting the opportunity available. Most Countries that have made it including China and India started by manufacturing for their local consumption then discovered importation on local saturation.

In Kenya, look at the mobile phone industry, when it all started we could not afford phones, only parents had these phone, yet even without much improvement in personal income today even grandparents and school children have phones. If telco companies used your argument they would have opted out of this market.

The best performing companies locally do well by selling locally here am looking at Equity, EABL, Safaricom etc, these are the Top companies and they get their money from the Kenyans of all social status. Also individuals like Muguku (of the 1 day old chicks) have become wealthy by selling to the same population.

Our most undoing is lack of knowledge especially for the rural folk, and overdepedency on foreign products which is all about attitude and beliefs in our social fabric. Thats besides the high energy costs, poor communication and transport infrastructure, corruption, poor governance, weak legal system, poor governance and poor education.