"Decide what’s right before you decide what’s possible." -- Brian Tracy http://amplify.com/u/grnd

"Personal leadership is not a singular experience. It is, rather, the ongoing process of keeping your vision and values before you and aligning your life to be congruent with those most important things." -- Stephen Covey http://amplify.com/u/ghl1

I am an Afrimist, jut like Edward B Mendy

If one is not an Afrimist, they are limited, as even if data screams at the them at the highest of decibels, with strong positive signals, they fail to hear the positive message. Even if this data comes through one of the other four human senses, they become blind, oblivious, deaf, and are devoid of the ability to taste the uplifting nuggets of good news.



It is for the very same reasons that business leadership in most companies, have failed over the recent past, to harness the high returns associated with the perceived risks of doing business in Africa. Many business, risk and financial analysts, have been suffering from 'herd mentality' when it comes to how they judge Africa, only to be pipped at the post, by off shore researchers, who have recently rated Africa, as one, on the high rise in most aspects that a risk-averse institutional & nation-states investor would be looking at.



The foresight (displayed by Pan-African leaders) that led to the revamp of the OAU (Organisation of African Unity) into the AU (African Union), as well as the formation of its project (NEPAD), as well as its business arm, the NEPAD Business Group, is paying off. The African Peer Review Mechanism is bringing a shift away from rulership to leadership, where leaders in Africa are behaving in ways that indicate their acceptance of sharp eyes of their constituencies.



The very same Mo Ibrahim Foundation, is a product of new African pride, supported by many, who want to leave a better legacy, and bequeth an Africa that the 7th generation will be proud of...



I repeat, I am an Afrimist too!

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Africa is not depressing

Thursday, 21 October 2010

On October 4 2010, the headline on the BBC's website announcing the results of the Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance read:  Africa democratic rights advances reversed, says report.

The article went on with an overall focus on the reversal of democratic advances outlined in the report. According to the BBC article, the index suggests that across Africa, economic and health gains are being undermined by declines in political rights, security and the rule of law.

The emphatic conclusion of the BBC article was that the results of the Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance 2010 report were 'depressing.'  According to the BBC article, the report points to the fact that 35 of 53 states have become less secure, while two-thirds of African countries show a declining performance in terms of human rights.

The BBC article, in my opinion, was a typical distortion and sensationalising of news out of Africa.  After reading it, I couldn't help but wonder whether the author of the article read the same report I read.  While it is true that there have been some reversal of democratic advances on the continent, as the index suggests, the report provided more good news than bad.

In addition to an unchanged average score in the report, Africa advanced in more areas that the index assessed than it regressed. In overall scoring, Africa advanced in two index group indicators while regressing in two others, a tie at worse. More importantly, the advances were made in the areas that matter most to Africans-our health, food in our bellies and overall development. African citizens are becoming healthier, have greater access to economic opportunities and are better off from a human development standpoint than they were five years ago.  That this economic growth and improvement in the life of the average African were achieved while Africa was receiving less help from the West and in a period of great economic upheaval in the world gives me hope that Africa's progress continues to gather steam, and is unstoppable.

The Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance ranks 53 African countries according to 88 indicators, ranging from corruption to education.  The index, which has been published since 2007, scores countries on a scale of zero to 100, sponsored by Sudanese telecoms mogul Mo Ibrahim.

The official press release on the report made the following observation:

In both Sustainable Economic Opportunity and Human Development there have been    improvements in many African countries. Importantly, no country has declined significantly in these categories. In Sustainable Economic Opportunity, 41 African states improved; ten of these were significant.    In Human Development, 44 of Africa's 53 countries progressed driven by improvements in most countries in the Health and Welfare sub-category. Two of the improvements in Human Development were significant.

The indisputable fact is: Africa is developing.  The development may be slow but it is sure.  This development is not just economic.  It can be found in just about any aspect of human development-politics, education, health, governance and other human development indicators.  While the road is not smooth and Africa incessantly experiences setbacks, the progress is incontrovertible.  The progress is seen in the resolve of Africans to improve their lot and of African policy makers to address the needs of Africans.  It is evident in the efforts being made to integrate the economies of the various regions of the continent.  It is demonstrated in the world's improved perception of the continent as a great place to do business, courtesy of African countries like South Africa, Egypt, Libya and Nigeria, as well as the BRIC countries, the World Cup press and the myriads of reports and publications incessantly touting the African economic renaissance.

Like it or not, Africa is on an irreversible path of economic transformation and development that will overshadow any regression made in the political and personal safety areas.

By Edward B. Mendy Edward B. Mendy is an African lawyer educated and practising in the United States.  Mendy is an avowed Africa-optimist (Afrimist), who will be blogging for Africa - The Good News. Read more at www.sagoodnews.co.za

 

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Leadership Caffeine: Mistakes are the Raw Ingredients of Leadership Courage

Certainly, the more I became BOLD & Courageous, and in the process, committed leadership mistakes, the more the dreaded fear DISAPPEARED, and the less mistakes I made. I gained more courage, and personal confidence, fueled by a higher degree of self awareness, AND I am making my mistakes, without losing my self esteem, as I know they are LEADERSHIP Caffeine.

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Management Excellence Ideas and approaches in business performance excellence.

Leadership Caffeine: Mistakes are the Raw Ingredients of Leadership Courage

I’ve made a number of mistakes over the course of my leadership career that make my head spin and my stomach turn just thinking about them.  No life or death or business impacting mistakes, but, definitely some people and team impacting issues that created ill will and most definitely didn’t show me off at my leadership best.

Learning from those mistakes helped me evolve my thinking on the role of a leader and on my true priorities in supporting my business, my peers and my team members. While it would have been nice to skip these speed bumps, the lessons are forever burned into my cerebral cortex or wherever it is in our brains that those things are burned on to our hard drives.

Somewhere along the road to making my share of mistakes, an interesting thing happened to my fear of making mistakes. It disappeared! And don’t misinterpret the statement. I don’t seek out mistakes and I don’t not (double negative by design) care about mistakes, but, I just don’t fear them.  In fact, I’m more concerned about not riding on the cutting edge of what I believe to be the right thing for my stakeholders than I am about falling off and getting shredded in the process.

A leader preoccupied with the fear of making a mistake is playing not to lose versus playing to win. It turns out that developing personal courage is critical to developing as an effective leader.

. Doing the right thing promptly and fairly when it comes to dealing with performance issues. 2. Screwing up the courage to deliver the tough feedback everyday. 3. Accepting accountability for your own and for your team’s mistakes or performance lapses. 4. Supporting the person that you believe in to your core, in spite of the prevailing opinion from your peers or leaders. 5. Supporting a person that you believe in, in spite of the fact that she may not believe in herself. 6. Advocating a direction that challenges the traditional thinking (Prahalad’s “dominant logic”) while taking direct hits from the slings and arrows of, “We’ve never done it that way before.” 7. Being smart and confident enough to understand the politics of organization-life, and tough enough to avoid the traps and land mines that others attempt to draw you into on your journey. 8. Learning to say “no” to people and projects for the right reasons. “No,” may be the toughest word to learn in the leader’s vocabulary.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Writing this post is like cueing Sinatra’s, “My Way,” but Ol’ Blue Eyes had it right, in my opinion. You’ll make more than a few mistakes, and if you’re committed to developing as an effective leader, you’ll learn to quickly seize the learning opportunities, adjust your course as needed and move on to better performance. Here’s to our mistakes and the lessons learned as we develop our leadership courage! Read more at artpetty.com

 

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"Very few of us are authorities on the truth. About the closest that any of us can get is what we hope is the truth or what we think is the truth. That's why the best approach to truth is probably to say, ‘It seems to me...’" -- Jim Rohn http://amplify.com/u/ft4f

I wouldn't publish my whereabouts for the risk of getting my house burgled, or being known by unsavoury characters, where I could be 'chilling'...

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How to Control Your Privacy With Foursquare and Other Geolocation Services

Geolocation is one of the hottest trends in social networking today. Users enjoy connecting with friends at nearby locations. Businesses are beginning to take note of the opportunity to tie their brick-and-mortar locations to their online marketing. In addition to the main local social networking applications—Foursquare and Gowalla—Google, Facebook and Twitter have added geolocation features to their services to tap into this trend. As users provide more information about their location, serious privacy implications are beginning to surface. For instance, a Webroot study released in July 2010 found that more than half of survey respondents who used geolocation services were worried their privacy was at risk.  Privacy Problems The first wave of criticism about the privacy implications of geolocation social networks followed the launch in February 2010 of Please Rob Me, which combined people’s physical location through geolocation services with data about their residence from other public data. When people were “checked in” at other places, unscrupulous individuals could find out and take advantage through Please Rob Me, though the site’s founders said they were only trying to demonstrate the problems posed by sharing geolocation data. In March 2010, the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a lawsuit with the FTC alleging that Google violated people’s privacy by making geolocation data available to the general public in its Google Buzz product. The geolocation privacy backlash continued with the launch of Facebook Places, which enabled users who had recently checked into a place to see all other users who had been there through the “Here Now” feature. This launch prompted the American Civil Liberties Union to put out a data sheet on how people could protect their online privacy and voice concerns about the practice of listing physical locations through geolocation services. Social Networks React An example of a Facebook Place To assure users that participating in geolocation social networking was safe and controllable, social networks began to provide additional privacy controls. This was likely in response to the concern and potential litigation regarding privacy and by the spate of violence through Craigslist connections. Twitter users can select whether to include their whereabouts for each message. Privacy advocates were never as keen to target it for criticism, though many of the same negatives exist for sharing location data in this way. Twitter also lets you delete your entire geolocation history, which makes users feel more comfortable with the choice to display location data. In response to the privacy backlash, Google made the option to make contacts private more prominent. It also allowed users to block Buzz followers directly from profile pages. Facebook addressed privacy generally after several separate privacy issues arose over information-sharing settings, but has yet to make public statements about the implications of Facebook Places on privacy. Potential Solutions Face2Face is a geolocation social networking service that restricts location data to user-specified friends. Startup geolocation companies are popping up to serve the supposed market need for a service with the best of both worlds. Once such company, face2face, markets itself as “a discreet way to let your friends know when you’re nearby.” It restricts geolocation data to specific friends set by the user, giving more control over the privacy question back to the end consumer. Another way to protect against negative uses of geolocation data is to take precautions to avoid tying your current physical location to your home address. Jason Falls gave this sound advice in a column he did on safety tips for Gowalla and Foursquare. In the Webroot study mentioned above, many users of social networks—geolocation social networks in particular—did not follow best practices to keep interactions on these networks safe. For example, 31% of survey respondents accepted friend requests from strangers. These types of shocking data points show that people are probably not treating online interactions with enough caution, especially those with a geolocation component. Geolocation social networks do raise some privacy concerns worth noting, but prudent use of each service, including understanding how to properly establish privacy settings, clears up much of the concern. As long as you’re smart about it, geolocated interactions will stay as harmless as other online social interactions. Location-based Social Network Users: What are ways you protect your privacy while enjoying these services? Have you ever had an issue with privacy on any of these services? Leave your comments in the box below.

See more at socialmediatoday.com

 

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The m-pesa account between Vodacom and one of the major banks in South Africa, is one good example of correspondent banking... Early entrants into these kinds of innovations, even in different business models and sectors, usually pay off, as late-comers usually find it difficult to justify the required cost and effort of collaboration...

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A new idea in banking for the poor

By teaming up with retail outlets in low-income, often hard-to-reach areas, financial institutions can create value both for themselves and their new customers.

NOVEMBER 2010 • Alberto Chaia, Robert Schiff, and Esteban Silva

Correspondent banking has become one of the most promising strategies for offering financial services in emerging markets. In this model, financial institutions work with networks of existing nonbank retail outlets—such as convenience stores, gas stations, and post offices—to deliver financial services. This approach can be especially powerful when serving the unbanked poor because of its ability to reduce banks’ cost-to-serve and reach low-income workers where they live. In Brazil, where the strategy has enjoyed its greatest successes, about 1,600 municipalities (approximately one-third of the total) are served solely by correspondent-banking outlets.

Correspondent (or agent) banking benefits a range of stakeholders. The poor gain convenient access to financial services in their own communities. Financial institutions reach a vast new customer segment. Agents increase their sales volumes and have an opportunity to develop deeper relationships with customers.

But implementing correspondent strategies can be tough. It may be hard to build networks of partners that can fulfill the correspondent role. The economics are still uncertain for players that don’t offer a range of services. And because the strategy is relatively new for financial-services providers, it is difficult to know exactly what will work in each particular community.

We came to similar conclusions in our own research. In Mexico, the all-in cost of offering savings accounts (including marketing, opening an account, and per-transaction costs) through correspondent outlets is about 25 percent lower than offering them through traditional branches (exhibit). Correspondent models thus help organizations serve low-income consumers at a lower cost, which is particularly important because people in the segment typically transact in small sums.

The use of correspondent agents is leading to a significant expansion of low-income workers’ physical access to financial services:

Brazil: In 2000, nearly 30 percent of Brazil’s municipalities had no access to formal financial services. But between 1999 and 2003, the government revised its regulations to allow correspondent banking and facilitated its expansion by improving the country’s interbank transfer system. By 2004, every municipality in Brazil had access to formal financial services, and about 1,600 (one in four) were served only by the correspondent network.

Mexico: More than 5,000 correspondent outlets, supported by 11 banks, have sprung up since the government authorized correspondent banking in late 2009. The government is using it to build a basic financial-services offering through more than half of the 23,000 state-owned Diconsa stores. Since 2009, a pilot program using point-of-sale devices and fingerprint-based identity cards has delivered government payments to nearly 200,000 households. Mexico’s government could use the network to reach two million or more beneficiaries4 and to add savings and insurance to the range of services it provides.5

Kenya: M-Pesa, a successful mobile-money transfer service in Kenya, depends on physical locations that operate like correspondent outlets to give users quick and convenient opportunities to withdraw or deposit cash. Its approach involves exchanging cash for float (in an electronic form issued by the mobile operator) at one of the organization’s 16,000 retail outlets, also known as agent points. This capability is a critical component of all mobile-financial-services offerings, since consumers must be able to convert digital funds to cash, and it is much more cost effective for providers to fulfill this need by tapping into existing physical networks than to build their own from scratch.6

Perhaps above all else, correspondent banking is still relatively new in the context of financial inclusion. The rules of the game vary by geography, and the game itself changes as the strategy develops: competition is increasing, the regulatory landscape is shifting, and customer attitudes are evolving. While uncertainty opens opportunities for innovative institutions, it also presents risks, particularly for companies that can’t refine their approaches by incorporating what they learn during implementation.

Guidelines for success

The success of organizations in countries such as Brazil, Kenya, and Mexico suggests a path for the next generation of correspondent-banking models. Drawing on these experiences, as well as on our research, we have identified four guidelines that can help organizations implement successful correspondent strategies.

Move quickly to capture early-entrant advantages

In Brazil, the bank Bradesco gained a significant advantage in 2001 by quickly securing exclusive access to distribute financial services through the agencies of the country’s post office, Empresa Brasileira de Correios e Telégrafos. That gave the company a network of 5,532 post offices, including more than 1,700 in municipalities that lacked banks.7 Through Banco Postal, a wholly owned subsidiary, Bradesco extended correspondent services to the entire network in just five years.8

Build the partner network rigorously

Providers can use a cost curve analysis to understand the relative expense and potential reach of different channels in different communities of varying population densities. Such an analysis of the Mexican market suggests that correspondent banking would be a good way to expand capacity in large cities and the only viable option in small villages. But it would be more difficult in midsize towns where large retail networks are scarce. This kind of evidence can help financial institutions understand how to configure a correspondent network so they can find retail partners that provide the appropriate reach into the communities they want to serve.

Organizations can build trust over time by providing a consistently high-quality experience. Those that already operate correspondent networks and have a good reputation with the customer base may gain trust more easily when they open new correspondent locations. Likewise, financial institutions that are starting up networks may benefit from identifying and prioritizing partners that have good relationships with target consumers to increase the likelihood of their using correspondent services once they are available.

Create diversified product offerings

Providers must develop product offerings that not only attract consumers but also generate sufficient value to sustain banking operations. Correspondent partnerships that offer more than bill-payment services and savings accounts are likelier to thrive than those that do not.

Direct-deposit services also offer value for both consumers and providers of correspondent services. Much like government transfers, the electronic payment of salaries or pensions is convenient for consumers. Such products could also serve as the foundation for credit offerings based on expected cash flows from employers. In Brazil, the volume of payroll-linked loans grew by more than 110 percent annually—four times the pace of credit cards—in the first four years after regulators authorized the products, in 2003.

Conduct pilots that can be rapidly implemented and continually refined

The learning curve for correspondent banking in the context of financial inclusion is steep. Organizations should expect to make mistakes when they develop their models. The most successful operations design processes that enable them to learn from their mistakes and to develop solutions as they proceed.

Safaricom, a telecom provider, took a similar approach to piloting when it developed its M-Pesa mobile-payment service. Originally conceived as a platform for receiving and making payments on small loans, M-Pesa partnered with the local microfinance company Faulu to gain access to clients. Piloting suggested that the service would undercut Faulu’s offering but that the population would value general payment and remittance services. M-Pesa redefined its value proposition as a result, and today it is one of the world’s most successful mobile-money transfer services.12

Pioneering organizations around the world are demonstrating the value of correspondent banking. As the strategy evolves, it will become increasingly important as a way to develop scale in financial inclusion. It is not only an effective alternative to building new branches but also an important adjunct to mobile financial services, providing cost-effective outlets for cash-in, cash-out services. Experience suggests that early entrants gain the most. Organizations that start now could promote social and economic benefits for poor people by dramatically expanding financial inclusion and thus helping a growing number of low-income workers gain access to financial tools that they can use to improve their lives. Read more at www.mckinseyquarterly.com

 

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