The quest by Africa as a continent to overcome its current development challenges can only become realisable with the development and deployment of engagement strategies that will ensure the continent owns and tells its own stories, pioneer chief executive of the rebranding Nigeria Project and Chairman, Prima Garnet Group, Lolu Akinwunmi has said.
Akinwunmi, according to a statement who spoke as one of the panellists at the recently concluded African Investment Forum organized by the African Development Bank in Johannesburg, South Africa noted that the continent will not always be the provider of raw materials for developed nations and must take clear and well defined steps towards changing the Africa narrative.
For the Advertising guru, Africa must, as a matter of necessity, begin to be more deliberate and strategic in defining the message it wants to communicate about itself and its people; determine the audience for all its communication, especially within the scope of attracting global financing for the continent and also determine how to most effectively reach this global audience given the plethora of media within the landscape.
“As an investment destination, Africa is perhaps the last frontier in many areas that present amazing opportunities. There are about six key areas of brand property ownership and opportunities and our narrative ought to be focused on projecting these on medium and long term basis. The African middle class is growing and with certain expectations; Africans are getting more educated, urbane and professional; Africa also has the largest population of young people under the age of 25; Africans are becoming more brand conscious and sophisticated in taste; These are affecting retail businesses in fashion, lifestyle products, etc. These are keeping retailers busy as they anticipate the needs of this growing list of new consumers”.
While he noted that Africa has huge opportunities in the energy, technology, supply chain design and the agriculture value chain, he lamented the continent’s crippling infrastructure deficit, a factor he blames for the difficulty in harnessing opportunities that will enable the continent take advantage of the maturity and saturation of developed economies
Highlighting what he termed the continent’s “soft infrastructure deficit, he insisted that the continent could no longer take data gathering for granted in such critical areas as credit and risk information, market data, consumption pattern, among others, because of their importance to policy formulation and planning as well as business decision-making.
