African Media Changing to Reach Growing Middle Class

Africa’s growing middle classes are being targeted by a new generation of media entrepreneurs. This growing group of Africans is ambitious and intelligent, and they want media that matches their aspirational ways. Clever media people are stepping up to feed this trend.

The continent as a whole forms the 10th largest economy in the world. Of Africa’s more than 1 billion people, 900 million can be classified as part of the consumer economy. Out of this group, there a third – approximately 300 million people – make modest sums by Western standards, about US $200 a month, but have spare cash to buy things like mobile phones, DVDs and new clothes, or pay for better schools. They are the population that is overlooked when attention is focused only on the very poor living on less than US $2 a day.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Nigerian journalist Dele Olojede is one of several African media pioneers re-shaping the continent’s media and taking it to the next level. Another is Godfrey Mwampembwa, whose popular puppet television show satirizes contemporary politics and current events and brings a welcome local flavour to a programming schedule packed with foreign imports.

A book by University of Texas professor Vijay Mahajan, Africa Rising, details the phenomenon of Africa’s middle class consumer society. He calls this group of middle class consumers ‘Africa 2′, with the desperately poor called Africa 3s, and the extremely rich Africa 1s.

This new group has expanded far beyond just the ruling elites and government workers. Many of its members work in the private sector, as secretaries, computer entrepreneurs, merchants and others who have benefited from consistent growth rates in many African countries.

And because these people consume products and services – and advertising products and services are the lifeblood of private media – the opportunities are plentiful.

“I’m convinced that Africa is going to be built by Africa 2s,” Mahajan told the Washington Post newspaper. “These are the people sending their kids to school . . . who are the most optimistic, the most forward-thinking.”

Olojede, owner and publisher of Next newspaper (http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Home/index.csp) in Nigeria’s biggest city, Lagos, has been able to grab readers by breaking original stories and offering a quality, well-designed publication. Launched in 2008, it has its sights set on going continent-wide by 2011.

“There is a need for a newspaper for the African metropolitan middle classes, along the lines of the International Herald Tribune,” he told Monocle magazine.

Olojede cut his teeth as a foreign editor for the US newspaper Newsday and has used this experience to make Next such a success.

Next has become the number one news website in Nigeria’s highly competitive media scene.

Wisely, Olojede put design at the centre of making his newspaper and website stand out from the competition. He commissioned the experienced newspaper design team of Garcia Media (http://garciamedia.com/blog/articles/in_west_africa_a_new_newspaper_is_born_—online_first) – who have designed for The Wall Street Journal, The Miami Herald and Die Zeit – to develop the template and prototypes.

Kenyan economist James Shikwati (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Shikwati) believes Africa’s middle-income consumers are also a driving force for political change.

“It’s empowering,” he told the Washington Post. “If you give people a sense of freedom in the economic sector, then you deny it in the political sector, you have a problem.”

Kenya-based newspaper cartoonist Gado (Godfrey Mwampembwa) has profited from this phenomenon. Fed up with TV channels sticking to a menu of foreign imports and dull news programmes, he looked to famous puppet TV shows Spitting Image (from Britain) and Les Guignols (from France) for inspiration. The result is the XYZ Show (http://xyzshow.com/blog), which features grotesque puppet caricatures of well-known public and political figures. The show’s blog makes for an excellent entry point into African TV programme-making and its ups and downs. The show is broadcast on Citizen TV in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.

“I moved to Nairobi in 1992 when I was 23,” Mwampembwa explained to Monocle. “The Daily Nation, the biggest newspaper in Kenya, had lost its editorial cartoonist so they ran a competition to look for his replacement. I sent in my drawings and came second.”

“I took a year off in 2000-2001 to study film and animation in Vancouver. When I got back to Nairobi I started thinking about the sort of TV programme I would like to make. Kenya needed a show that would make fun of our politicians and expose hypocrisy and I thought a puppet show like Les Guignols or Spitting Image would be a great way to do it.”

“We managed to raise funds for a pilot in 2007 and Citizen TV (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Citizen-TV-Kenya/261061365404), a private station, eventually agreed to broadcast a series.”

Each episode costs US $16,740 and the puppets are US $3,600 to make. The programme-makers could only get money from foreign donors: the French, Dutch, and Finnish embassies and the Ford Foundation.

Despite initial complaints from politicians, the show is preparing for its second season – and, Mwampembwa said, “there will be a lot of big stories for us to cover.”

Making a popular TV show is not an easy thing to do. Mwampembwa maintains a furious work pace to straddle his many roles:

“I have to draw a cartoon every day but editorial cartooning is not a nine-to-five job, it’s 24/7. Whenever I get ideas I have to sketch them.

“It was a steep learning curve in the first season. The show is important for Kenyan TV and everything is done here in Nairobi. We won’t change any of the politics though. We are very hard-hitting and we will stay that way.

“Over the years I’ve got nasty letters, emails and phone calls but that’s OK, it’s part of it.”

As these media innovators show, there is nothing but opportunity for entrepreneurs feeding the hungry news and information appetite of the continent’s ambitious middle class.

And Mwampembwa says becoming better informed doesn’t have to be dull: “We are informing the public but I’d like to think we are entertaining them too.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: September 2010

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Brazil’s Agricultural Success Teaches South How to Grow

Inflation, environmental stresses and population and economic growth are testing the world’s food supply systems. There is a strong need to boost yields and improve the quality of food.

Between now and 2050 the world’s population will rise from 7 billion to 9 billion. Urban populations will probably double and incomes will rise. City dwellers tend to eat more meat and this will boost demand.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reckons grain output will have to rise by around half but meat output will have to double by 2050 to meet demand.

Two pioneering approaches to growing food in Brazil offer valuable lessons to countries looking to increase their food production.

One is taking place in Bahia state in north-eastern Brazil. On Brazil’s cerrado (savannah) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerrado), enormous farms grow cotton, soybeans and maize. One of them, Jatoba farm, has 24,000 hectares of land: vastly larger than comparable farms in the United States.

On the Cremaq farm in the north of the country in Piaui state, a transformation has taken place. Once a failed cashew farm, it is now a highly modern operation. Owned by BrasilAgro, it is benefiting from clever agricultural innovation that gets results.

BrasilAgro’s approach is to buy derelict or neglected farms and give them a high-tech makeover. The ‘makeover’ includes radio transmitters tracking the weather, SAP software (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_AG), a well-organized work force under a gaucho (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaucho), new roads criss-crossing the fields, and a transport network of trucks to quickly get the food to ports for export. Piaui is an isolated place with few services: it can take half a day to get to a health clinic. Dependence on state welfare payments for survival is the norm for many residents.

Brazil, over 30 years, transformed itself from a food importer to one of the world’s major food exporters. It is now considered alongside the ‘Big Five’ top grain exporters of America, Canada, Australia, Argentina and the European Union. Importantly, it is the first tropical nation to do this.

The value of Brazil’s crops rose from US $23 billion in 1996, to US $62 bn in 2006. It is the world’s largest exporter of poultry, sugar cane and ethanol, and there has been a tenfold increase in beef exports in a decade.

Brazil made these impressive achievements with few government subsidies. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), state support accounted for just 5.7 percent of total farm income in Brazil from 2005-07. In the US it was 12 percent, while the OECD average is 26 percent and the level in the European Union is 29 percent.

And despite frequent alarming reports, much of the farming expansion has not happened at the expense of the Amazon forests.

The agricultural success is down to Embrapa (http://www.embrapa.br/english) – short for Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária, or the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation. A public company set up in 1973, it has turned itself into the world’s leading tropical research institution. It breeds new seeds and cattle and has developed innovations from ultra-thin edible wrapping paper for foodstuffs that turns colour when the food goes off to a nano-tech lab creating biodegradable ultra-strong fabrics and wound dressings.

Its biggest achievement has been turning the vast expanses of the cerrado green for agriculture. Norman Borlaug, an American plant scientist often called the father of the Green Revolution, told the New York Times that “nobody thought these soils were ever going to be productive.” They seemed too acidic and too poor in nutrients.

Embrapa uses what its scientists call a “system approach”: all the interventions work together. Improving the soil and developing new tropical soybeans were both needed for farming the cerrado. The two together also made possible the changes in farm techniques which have boosted yields further.

Many believe this approach can be applied to Africa as well. There are several reasons to think it can. Brazilian land is like Africa’s: tropical and nutrient-poor. The big difference is that the cerrado gets a decent amount of rain and most of Africa’s savannah does not (the exception is the swathe of southern Africa between Angola and Mozambique).

Another approach that Brazil has been pioneering is making small, family farms sustainable and productive for the 21st century.

There has long been a tension between those who believe in very large farms, agribusiness and mono-crops (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono-cropping), and those who believe in having a large number of smaller farms with a wide variety of crops and animals.

But small farms have endured. The livelihoods of more than 2 billion people depend on the 450 million smallholder farms across the world. With their families, they account for a third of the world’s population.

Family farms are critical to weathering economic crises and ensuring a steady and secure food supply. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) (www.ifad.org) called in 2008 for small family farms to be put at the heart of the global response to high food prices and uncertain food security.

In Brazil, this call is being answered by a bold initiative to create what is termed a “social technology”, combining a house building programme with diverse family farms.

The Brazilian farmers’ cooperative Cooperhaf: Cooperativa de Habitacao dos Agricultores Familiares (http://www.cooperhaf.org.br) – a World Habitat Awards winner – combines housing and farm diversification to support family farmers.

“Family farming is very important for the country – 70 percent of food for Brazilians comes from family farming,” said Adriana Paola Paredes Penafiel, a projects adviser with the Cooperhaf. “The government wants to keep people in rural areas.”

“We see the house as the core issue,” she continued.  “The farmers can improve their productivity but the starting point is the house.”

Started in 2001 by a federation of farmers unions, the Cooperhaf works in 14 Brazilian states with family farmers. In Brazil farmers have a right to a house in the law and the cooperative was formed to make sure this happened.

“We promote diversification to make farmers less vulnerable: if they lose a crop in macro farming, they lose everything. We encourage diversification and self-consumption to guarantee the family has food everyday. We help to set up a garden.”

The concept is simple: a good quality home acts as an anchor to the family farm, making them more productive as farmers. The farmers receive up to 6,000 reais (US $2,290) for a house, and can choose designs from a portfolio of options from the Cooperhaf.

As in other countries, the Cooperhaf and other co-ops encourage markets and certification programmes to promote family farmed food and raise awareness. Penafiel says promoting the fact that the food is family farmed is critical: to the consumer it is healthier, fresher and contains fewer chemicals than imported produce.

“Most agri business is for export,” said Penafiel. “If we don’t have food in the country, food for poor communities would not be available. This enables farmers to be more autonomous, not having to buy fertilizers and equipment and take on too much debt. That approach is not sustainable as we saw with the so-called Green Revolution.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: September 2010

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Indians Fighting Inflation with Technology

Despite the global economic downturn, many countries of the South are seeing rapid economic growth. That can have a down side: inflation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation). Inflation can be caused by variety of factors – too much money chasing too few goods, deliberate government policies to increase demand for goods and services, environmental disasters creating scarcity, or poor investment in infrastructure straining against rapid economic growth. But when it gets out of control for life-essential goods like food, then people need solutions to survive.

In India – home to more poor people than all of sub-Saharan Africa – rising inflation has prompted the Reserve Bank of India to raise interest rates, which in turn leads to more expensive loans and credit, just when funds need to be borrowed to invest in infrastructure improvements for the country.

India’s finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, has warned that the rising interest rates necessary to fight inflation will hurt India’s economic growth.

India has seen inflation jump from single digits in 2008 to double digits this year. Consumer price inflation for industrial and farm workers in India rose by 14 percent, government data show – up from 5.51 percent in January 2008 (It hit 16.22 percent in January 2010, according to the Indian Ministry of Labour).

And it is the poorest who suffer the most from inflation. Inflation in India has led to worker protests for wage increases and rising prices for essentials like food: a life-and-death issue for the poor.

Other countries across the South are also experiencing high inflation, the worst being Venezuela. India has the highest inflation after Venezuela’s 32 percent rate, according to Bloomberg data compiled from 82 countries.

The UN’s trade and development body, UNCTAD, has called for new measures to tackle inflation. “In the past few decades, monetary policies have been more and more gradually based on inflation targeting,” said Supachai Panitchpakdi, secretary-general of UNCTAD. “I see there should be other instruments to contain inflation rather than monetary policies.”

Frustration with inflation has even been taken up by India’s vibrant entertainment industry, Bollywood (http://www.bollywoodworld.com).

The song “Mehangayi Daayan” (“The Inflation Witch”) in a film produced by acting star Aamir Khan has the lyrics, “my husband’s earnings are good but his second wife — inflation — is eating them up.”

Indian marketing consultant Suhasini Sakhare (http://www.suhasinisakhare.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&layout=blog&id=2&Itemid=12) from Nagpur has called for Indian consumers to be empowered, just as farmers are with the successful e-Choupal web portal.

E-Choupal (http://www.echoupal.com) has developed a reputation for both controlling prices and increasing incomes for poor farmers. Started in 2000 by the major Indian company ITC Limited (http://www.itcportal.com), it links farmers to the latest prices for products including soybeans, wheat, coffee and prawns.

E-Choupal works through computers set up in rural areas. It has built one of the largest internet initiatives in rural India, reaching 4 million farmers in 40,000 villages. It does this through 6,500 computer kiosks located in the homes of farmer-coordinators called Sanchalaks. The kiosks offer weather reports and the latest market prices, important scientific developments, risk management advice, and help with sales and marketing. The computer is in the Sanchalak’s house and connects to the internet by telephone. Each computer can serve around 600 farmers in the surrounding area.

Indian agriculture suffers from being very fragmented, with poor infrastructure and an army of middlemen looking to get the best price for themselves at the expense of farmers and consumers. Indian farmers are heavily in debt and plagued by a very high suicide rate as a result (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers’_suicides_in_India). This agricultural crisis has a direct impact on India’s ability to meet its development goals and lift many millions more out of poverty in the future.

E-Choupal sees itself as creating a “virtuous circle of higher productivity, higher incomes, enlarged capacity for farmer risk management, larger investments and higher quality and productivity.”

E-Choupal has increased yields for farmers, reduced transaction costs, and raised the quality of output leading to rising farmer incomes.

It is clear from experience in other countries that better access to price information helps control price inflation. E-Choupal has the advantage of providing both information and the means to access it: a big problem in rural India. Most poor Indian consumers do not have access to the internet and make food purchases from small vendors, whom they must trust to set the right price for products.

Online, there are plenty of price comparison websites for Indians (http://explore.oneindia.in/internet/portal/comparisonsites): computers, electronics and household goods (http://compareindia.in.com) for example. But this is of no use to poor Indians without access to the information.

Economic commentator Paranjoy Guha Thakurta told AFP of the political dangers: “There’s a huge amount of discontent and anger across the country and certainly among the poor. Speak to the person on the street and their biggest problem is inflation.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: August 2010

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Mobile Applications Market: Opportunities for South

As the number of mobile phone users around the world mushrooms, so does the mobile phone applications market. Revenue from downloads of applications, or apps, topped US $10 billion in 2009, according to market analyst firm Juniper (http://juniperresearch.com).

Applications have two distinct advantages for the poor in the South. Apps targeted at the poor can boost incomes and increase health and education. And they are an emerging way to make money.

Somebody who develops an application can expect to make up to 70 percent of the download cost. Apple (http://www.apple.com/iphone/apps-for-iphone) – owner of the iPhone application store – claims it has already given developers over US $1 billion in revenues.

It is a growing industry. The market-leading Apple App Store now boasts more than 225,000 applications for download and sale. It says they have been downloaded an impressive 5 billion times.

Android Market (http://www.android.com/market/#app=com.com2us.HG), run by the search engine Google, has more than 60,000 apps on offer. GetJar (www.getjar.com), an independent mobile phone application store from Sweden, says it has 72,000 apps available and has had 1 billion downloads.

Now that the apps economy has been running for a couple years, it is possible to divine what increases a developer’s success. Some believe the apps marketplace mimics the dynamics of the music business, rather than the traditional software business.

GetJar chief executive Ilja Laurs told the Economist that it takes as long to write an app as a song. Apps on average cost about the same as a music download: US $1.90. And just like the pop music charts, a few become big hits but most never make it. Apps are also a quick hit: even after becoming successful they can quickly fade back to obscurity again. In short, they are fad and trend driven and are very much about the moment and a current need.

That means they are wide open to newcomers from the South.

With mobile phones now the main channel for information in East Africa, for example, and mobile penetration exceeding 40 percent of the population there, vast markets have opened for apps. East Africa has more than 120 million citizens, with a large majority living in rural areas: many needing poverty-fighting apps to change their lives.

Various new applications show the creative thinking already coming out of the South. South Africa’s Afridoctor (www.afridoctor.com) is Africa’s first personal mobile health clinic. Users submit photos of ailments and receive advice from a panel of professionals, or use the mapping feature to find doctors, clinics and all health industry related services nearby. The emergency feature notifies next of kin of your distress and location. Features include symptom checkers, first-aid information, health calculators and quizzes. Afridoctor hopes to make health care affordable and accessible to Africans. It is made by 24.com (http://store.ovi.com/publisher/24.com), South Africa’s largest digital brands group.

In Mexico, the tragedy of migrants dying as they try to cross the border to the United States is being addressed by Mexican professor Ricardo Dominguez, with funding from charities. He has developed an app tool to help people who cross the US-Mexico border find drinking water in the desert, churches with shelter, and human right groups offering them help. Immigrants download the app – being called a “platform for Migrant Border” – onto their mobile phones.

“The purpose is to provide a platform to travel safely through the desert,” said Dominguez, who led the design team.

App action has heated up in India, where Spice Mobiles (http://www.spiceglobal.com/SpiceMobiles/SpiceMobiles.aspx) – a wing of the Spice Group – is launching an application store with 250 content providers. India’s Bharti Airtel launched its first home-grown mobile application store in February of this year – Airtel App Central (http://www.airtel.in/apps). It clocked up over 13 million downloads in four months.

India’s Reliance Communications (http://www.rcom.co.in/Rcom/personal/home/index.html) also launched an application called Socially. It has been designed to enable users to follow the recent activity of friends, and also allows the user to update their status on different social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn through a single client.

Jon Gosier, from Appfrica Labs (http://appfrica.net/blog) – behind the highly successful crisis crowdsourcing Ushahidi application (http://www.ushahidi.com) – explained the thinking behind apps in Africa:

“Our goal is to show the world that Africa is capable of solving some of its own problems,” he told CP-Africa.com. “Too often Africans aren’t even considered as a resource when discussing how to improve their own quality of life.”

He has the following advice for would-be app developers: “Think global. Too many entrepreneurs here (Africa) think of themselves as competing with peers within their school or country. That’s not true. You’re competing in the global market now. If your website or web app doesn’t look as flashy or polished as the stuff from 37 Signals (www.37signals.com) or Carsonified (www.carsonified.com), you’ve still got work to do.

“You don’t get a pass on the web because you’re African. You get the challenge of working harder.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: August 2010

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Rwandan Coffee Brand Boost

A successful Rwandan company is using coffee shops to promote the nation’s high-quality coffee brands at home and abroad. Started by two Rwandan entrepreneurs three years ago, Bourbon Coffee (http://www.bourboncoffeeusa.com) now has three shops in the country’s capital, Kigali, and a savvily positioned shop in Washington DC.

While Rwandan coffee has built a good international reputation, the country’s more than 500,000 coffee farmers (mostly small-scale) previously depended on the product’s reputation alone. But Bourbon Coffee joins several other initiatives changing this situation and starting to significantly raise the profile of Rwandan coffee and build the Rwanda brand.

The East African nation experienced the horrific genocide of almost 1 million people in 1994. Ever since, the country has been on a journey to reconcile with the damage done during this time and move on to a more prosperous future for all its citizens. A key part of the country’s future success will be its economic prosperity. And historically, coffee has played a critical role in Rwanda’s economy.

The Bourbon Coffee chain of shops (taking its name from the high quality Bourbon coffee varietal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coffee_varieties) which accounts for the majority of Rwandan coffee), started with its first shop in Kigali in 2007. Started by Emmanuel Murekezi and Arthur Karuletwa, two Rwandans living in the United States, it is modelled on the popular American brand Starbucks (http://www.starbucks.com). The entrepreneurs admired the coffee culture experience found at Starbucks. Just as Starbucks heavily markets its complete quality control over the coffee experience, their philosophy is to produce great coffee from “crop to cup.”

“There are over 500,000 farmers that own 100 to 200 trees in the back of their yards, so the only way they can come up with a product is to come together in a cooperative sense,” Karuletwa told the Washington Post. It is a learning experience for the Rwandan coffee farmers: they learn to work together, trust each other and be accountable to each other. “Neighbours that once killed each other and communities that once floated in the same bloodbath are now hand in hand producing one of the most amazing products.”

“If done right, it could be the platform to re-brand the country,” continued Karuletwa, a former chief executive and now a shareholder in the company. Coffee can “create awareness that there’s recovery, there’s trade, there’s investment opportunities, there’s tourism. There’s life after death.”

The importance of good design and a strong brand in the success of a business cannot be emphasised enough. That extra effort and thought can take a business from local success to regional and even global success. As consultants KPMG make clear, “For many businesses, the strength of their brands is a key driver of profitability and cash flow.” Yet the majority of small businesses fail to think about their brand values or how design will improve their product or service.

The shops have a very tasteful modern, African design and feel. African sculpture and furniture are surrounded by African artwork. The shop’s logo is an eye-catching orange and there is an overall recognizable brand identity for the entire Bourbon Coffee concept.

The founders see it as an opportunity to educate people about the health benefits of coffee culture and the joys of the lifestyle. They proudly serve only Rwandan coffee and promote the national brands they serve, including Akagera, Kivu Lake, Kizi Rift, Muhazi and Virunga.

Bourbon Coffee, in a clever move, opened the Washington branch in 2009 in a former Starbucks in a neighbourhood packed with aid organizations and NGOs, many of which work with Rwanda on projects.

Karuletwa says Bourbon Coffee’s ambitious vision “is to stand as a symbol of a new era in African economic development, one in which African nations rise to participate directly in the global marketplace.”

“Coffee is a very intimate, emotional product,” he said. “The preparation, the processes and the profiling of coffee is similar to wine.”

The Rwandan branches can be found at the Union Trade Centre (UTC) in Kigali’s city centre, the MTN centre in Nyarutarama and Kigali airport.

The business is funded by Rwandan investors Tristar (http://www.tri-starinvestments.com/index.html).

Another initiative is the Rwandan Farmers Brand (http://www.rwandanfarmers.com). It also hopes to raise the profile of Rwandan coffee and drive more of the profits made into the hands of farmers. It is a joint venture between the foundations of former U.S. President Clinton and philanthropist Sir Tom Hunter. They fund all the brand’s creation and operation in partnership with 8,700 farmers. They have started selling Rwanda Medium Roast Ground in the United Kingdom’s Sainsbury’s supermarkets. Sixteen percent of sales are clear profit and returned to the farmers via their own Trust Fund.

Karuletwa says he doesn’t want Rwandan coffee to be “a pity-driven mission”. It is all about the quality: “The value initiative here is because this coffee tastes great,” he says.

And Bourbon Coffee is looking further afield to grow the brand: “We hope to expand even further,” Murekezi told Monocle magazine. “Congo, Burundi, Tanzania, but also Europe. We think the concept can work there too.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: August 2010

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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