African Entrepreneur, COVID-19: Where Do We Go From Here?
The new coronavirus, the disease known as COVID-19, has disrupted how we live, how we work and even how we close a business deal – try shaking a business partner’s hand.
Countries with high frequencies and severity of the disease had to put public health first by declaring lockdowns to track infection rates and manage cases. This hit their economies very hard.
When things got critical, government chose health over wealth because essentially health is wealth.
The pandemic presents a similar scenario to entrepreneurs – to queue and jostle over a piece of a stimulus package? Or to tap into an underlying entrepreneurial mindset which has kept them going despite existential credit access problems long before COVID-19 arrived on the scene?
Conversation
On May 15, 2020, I moderated a conversation on the topic: The African entrepreneur in the age of COVID-19: Coping Strategies for Today’s Reality.
This conversation humanised the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) estimate of the 2.7billion persons affected by the pandemic. It opened with an account of a woman who delights in making people look good.
Theresa Brown, the Chief Executive Officer of MBA Mode Institute, has been offering elegant, bespoke and affordable unisex apparel for the Ghanaian middle and upper class for over seven years in addition to training an average of 15 aspiring fashion designers in the skill, practicalities and business aspects of the profession annually.
Last year, she graduated 17 students in the usual fashion of ceremonial splendour. This year, she is graduating none. She estimates that COVID-19 has eaten 90 per cent of her business. The 10 per cent she is subsisting on comes from the production of facial masks.
However, interestingly, Theresa is rethinking her business model, and is considering shifting a part of her school online.
The opportunity for introspection and restrategising is also a view Mawule Messan shares in. He is the Managing Director of Sacrefilms, an Accra-based media company that tells stories of brands through short videos and documentaries.
Lockdown
If we were to be under lockdown for two straight years, what will the African entrepreneur do? This question by Vannel Dzigba, an entrepreneur and a startup coach who joined the conversation virtually from Michigan, USA sent us into deep contemplation.
It immediately struck a chord with Henrietta Adjetey, the Creative Director of Brand E, a branding and packaging company. While Theresa and Mawule had cause to pause and reflect, Henrietta got more orders from clients.
A consequence of the lockdown and the ban on social gathering meant people could not sit in restaurants to eat. This accelerated demand for food deliveries which also cascaded into more demand for food packaging materials.
Analogous to the story of Henrietta’s is that of Vincent Okeke, the co-founder of Agriple, a Nigerian based online farm market that connects farmers with consumers and off-takers in real time to minimise food waste.
Agriple transacts business with clients almost entirely online except for deliveries by their logistic partners. Business might have slowed for Agriple, but it is certainly not in dire straits; on the contrary, its growth prospects are boundless and seems to be on course in reducing the 1.3 billion tons of food that go waste every year.
Through these stories, we are exposed to entrepreneurs who have been affected in ways they did not anticipate – for good.
We have been hit by a surprise and as Emmanuel Awumee, a startup business development analyst expounded at some point in the conversation, there has been a shift in our normal patterns of behaviour.
The work of the entrepreneur is to make sense of this shift and make a business out of it.
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