Business in Africa
The Bottom Line
BBC
4.6 • 615 Ratings
🗓️ 21 February 2013
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The view from the top of business. Presented by Evan Davis, The Bottom Line cuts through confusion and spin to present a clearer view of the business world through discussion with people running leading and emerging companies.
This week, Evan's three guests discuss the challenges of doing business in and out of Africa. It consists of 54 countries and has more than a billion people but the continent was a sleeping giant for decades. Now it's woken up and could it be on the verge of becoming the economic powerhouse of the 21st Century?
Evan is joined in the studio by Andrew Rugasira, CEO of the Ugandan coffee company Good African Coffee; Herman Chinery-Hesse, co-founder of the Ghanaian software company SOFTtribe and Rupert Soames, CEO of the temporary power specialists Aggreko.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading this program from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:03.9 | In the bottom line this week, Evan Davis speaks to three business leaders |
| 0:07.7 | about the challenges of doing business in and out of Africa. |
| 0:13.2 | Hello and welcome to the programme. |
| 0:15.7 | We're going to talk about business in Africa today, so let's start with some facts. |
| 0:20.3 | It is home to a seventh of the world's |
| 0:22.4 | population, but it produces only a 40th of the world's output. Now, there are two ways to interpret that. |
| 0:29.5 | You can take it as a sign that Africa is poor, and thus of little interest to business, |
| 0:34.2 | or you can take it as a sign that it has enormous potential to grow, just as |
| 0:39.4 | China did before its lift off a couple of decades ago. Well, already some African economies |
| 0:44.6 | are stars in the World Growth League table. So how optimistic should we be? Well, we have three |
| 0:51.9 | guests to talk about business in Africa, and I think fair to say, |
| 0:55.8 | each of you more interested in the potential for growth there rather than the negative stories. |
| 1:01.3 | Let's meet each of my guests, and first up is Andrew Rugasira, chief executive of the |
| 1:06.1 | Ugandan coffee company. It's called Good African Coffee and available in a UK supermarket, Sandry. |
| 1:12.2 | Absolutely. Good African coffee works with a network of 14,000 coffee farmers in Uganda, |
| 1:18.0 | and we add value to the coffee in Uganda and export it to British supermarkets. We've been doing |
| 1:23.1 | this for the last eight years. So what value do you add? Have you built a huge processing plant? |
| 1:28.7 | What we have, we have a roasting and packing plant in Kampala. |
| 1:31.6 | So we buy the coffee from the farmers, |
| 1:33.4 | who we help with agronomy best practices. |
| 1:36.1 | We organise them into corporatives, |
... |
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