Strengthening Innovation in Africa

Guest blog by Anamaria Wills

Back to the office for the first time since I went to Zimbabwe – popped into the café and bumped into Emma Bearman, the Culture Vulture herself.  Our offices are side by side but we’re both out and about so much that meeting up is always a serendipitous affair!  Good, though – we’ve had some seriously interesting discussions, about Leeds Mayors, about culture in Leeds and so on.  We will pull together something significant in the near future, I’m sure – we have too many shared interests not to!

Emma had seen a couple of tweets about what I’d been doing in Zim and, after I’d bent her ear for about 45 minutes, she suggested that I did this blog about it for Culture Vulture.  Deeply flattered – have been watching the blogs for some time and am delighted to be able to join in.  But there is serious purpose too – so many of us get on with doing really interesting stuff that people never hear about because, after all, it’s just our work.  But it is the accumulation of this activity that feeds the culture of the city, that makes Leeds what it is, that creates an atmosphere where we take for granted that anything is possible, and that ‘stuff happens’ – in a good way.  So much of this is for Leeds the City to celebrate – to mark the individual contributions of some really creative thinking people in many different areas, and the sum of which is so much greater than its parts.  This is the richness of Leeds which should be articulated and exploited, and I am proud that we in CidaCo are now part of it.

So, there I was on 25 September, arriving in Harare, in the warm sun and the omnipresent jacaranda blossom that make that city seem so lovely.  My hotel was right beside Harare Gardens in which concerts take place all week and, at weekends, all day.  All my work that weekend was accompanied by sensational choral singing, sometime religious, sometimes contemporary and popular, but always musical, rhythmic, wonderful to listen to and playing to hundreds of people who seemed to come and go all day.  Just past the Gardens was the National Art Gallery which somehow sustains a regular series of exhibitions, both professional and from local schools; Rafael Chikukwa, the Chief Curator, conceived and curated the first Zimbabwe Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. The pavilion stole the show with its innovative, self-reflective and critical work presented by four of Zimbabwe’s established artists namely; Tapfuma Gutsa, Calvin Dondo, Berry Bickle and Misheck Masamvu.  It was an outstanding success, so much so that he is now fundraising to go again next year.  We worked together last year and he has become a good friend.

But this time I was in Harare for another purpose.  I was there to train 10 really extraordinary business professionals to work with me as our Innovation Coaches and to help roll out a ground breaking new innovation service across the continent.  This service, called Aiam Performance, is the result of a new partnership with Mandel Training, the leading executive education provider in Zimbabwe and acclaimed across Southern Africa.  Mandel is led by Johnson Manyakara, former HR Director of the Delta Group, one of the largest corporates in the region (4000 employees, the only company on the ZSE that reached a $1 Billion market capitalisation this week).  Johnson retired two years ago and did a deal with Delta to spin off the Executive Education programme as a company in its own right.  Delta retains an interest and its remarkable CEO, Joe Mutizwa, became Chair of the new company.

In November 2011, the British Council had invited me to give a public lecture on innovation in Harare.  Over 450 people paid to attend, confounding all expectations, and many CEOs of major companies were present.  At the end, Johnson Manyakara approached me, introduced himself and proposed a partnership between CidaCo and Mandel.  It took us about six months to develop the Partnership Agreement and we finally launched it last week.

As The Daily Telegraph newspaper commented in an article recently, “Some of the statistics are staggering. Africa is home to the world’s fastest-growing population; there are already 500 million mobile phones in Africa, with 850 million expected by 2015; Africa’s workforce is expected to be the world’s largest by 2035, bigger than both China’s and India’s; consumer spending is growing in Africa from around $900bn today to an anticipated $1.4 trillion by 2020.  Africa’s 4% share of the world’s economic output might grow to 7% by 2030 and to 12% by 2050. Over the same period, Western Europe’s 19% share is expected to fall to 11% and then 7%. North America’s, 22% today, is predicted to drop to 15% and then 11%.”

So our Aiam (based on  ‘African I am’) Performance programme offers training on innovation process and practice, tailored to the different levels in an organisation, and organisation development/culture change consultancy for organisations embarking on the transformation process.  The first step was to run our Innovation Coach training programme, training ten potential innovation coaches to help deliver the programme.  We had specified that the selected delegates should bring with them deep experience of business and we really got that!  In addition to Johnson, the group also included Joe Mutizwa,just retired as CEO of Delta and Chair of Mandel; Simbarashe E Mangwengwende, formerly CEO of the National Power Company; Adolf Gusha, Town Clerk of the largest local authority there; Peter Zwide

Khumalo, who is an African prince, descended from the last king in Zimbabwe and now deeply involved in communities’ development; and Charity Murandu, a strategy and marketing consultant – certainly one of the most high powered groups I’ve had in one room!   We had an amazing week, with the learning genuinely reciprocal.  At the end, Joe, on behalf of the group, commented:

‘Anamaria, when we started, we were curious and slightly irritated at having to give up 5 days to do this course.  We couldn’t think what you could teach us that would take that time.  We all now feel that it was one of the richest experiences we’ve had in years.’ From a group of people with their level of business expertise, that was some compliment!

So, now we are launched and the programme is finally public.  We are currently engaged in fruitful discussions with a range of the leading companies in Zimbabwe.  In February, we open the programme in Botswana, and, after that, current plans are to open in Zambia, Mauritius and Nigeria over the next 12 months.

Of course, the particular pleasure for me, as with all our innovation work in the UK and elsewhere, is that it is an example of the creative sector reaching out and influencing business in other sectors.  None of our potential clients in Africa are yet from the creative sector, but they all understand and value creativity as a key business tool.  As I take them through the ‘creative jamming’ (idea generation) to the ‘rehearsal’ (developing the value proposition through constant reiteration) to the ‘performance’ (making the pitch), it delights me that everything I’ve ever learned and used in my creative work now proves so effective in other kinds of business!