MeliaCRED: Conversations with Elvis

After a long career at the Boston Consulting Group, Martin Hecker created AmaliTech, a social business that specializes in exporting digital services from Africa to the world. Martin also created the DSAA, a club that funnels German development aid funding to global business services firms that set up offices in Africa.

Software development is among the most complex and best-paying jobs that can be offshored. This is what put the Indian IT-enabled Services sector on the global map. Yet a worldwide talent shortage still exists. As ever more young Africans now enter digital labour markets, ever more young software developers become available to the world.In this conversation, I speak with Objectivity's Jacques Nyilinkindi about the changes and opportunities in Kigali's technology ecosystem.

Global Business Services (GBS) companies come in many shapes. Deriv is an online brokerage firm that turned Kigali, Rwanda, into one of its global delivery locations. I spoke with Godfrey Zveynika, the Country Manager,  about Kigali as Deriv's decision for its Africa office, about Rwanda as a possible destination for other GBS firms, about Kigali's eco-system of digital services exporters, and about the pros and cons of different African countries for building service export clusters in the coming years.Show less

Are you a Rwandan graduate, looking to start your career in IT services? Are you a Global Business Services firm, looking for a new delivery location in Africa?Are you a government official, seeking to facilitate a digital services export cluster in your country?Are you an international development partner, hoping to support future-oriented job creation in an African metropolis?If you ticked yes on any of the above, please take a few minutes to listen to Gary Bennett speak about Kigali's emerging hub of services exports.

Kigali is home to a tight-knit ecosystem of up-skilling and work-readiness programs, tailored to the Global Business Services (GBS) sector. Firms interested in coming to Rwanda to export IT-enabled services, or firms interested in importing digital services through the internet from Rwanda might find this conversation interesting. In it, I speak with Vivens Uwizeyimana, founder and CEO of Umurava, a talent marketplace and workforce outsourcing platform. This is the last of our "ecosystem conversations," before we hear from the global companies who recently set up their offices in Kigali, exporting digital services to the world.

Across the world, many people's dream job is located somewhere in the creative economy. Making films and creating video content has become much more accessible over the past few years, and as the digital realm brings the world closer together, collaborations across borders can emerge in creative fields that were hitherto limited by geography.In our conversation, Hassan Tha Kreator tells me about his journey as a young filmmaker from Nigeria to Rwanda. We speak about the vast differences between these two countries, the future of African filmmaking, and how the strengths of different countries can complement each other as Africa's creative economy expands.

Imagine you're a global business services firm, thinking of setting up a new delivery center in an African country. Your first problem will be to decide on the right country. The next problem will be to figure out how to manage the local workforce. What are the labor laws, customs, and skill levels in that country? PesaChoice is a human resources management platform that seeks to help incoming companies with this second challenge. As PesaChoice expands across the continent (currently in Cote d'Ivoire, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda), part of its service becomes helping incoming firms solve their first challenge of comparing the pros and cons of different African locations. Pépita and I have a broad conversation about the opportunities for Rwanda's young population, about the differences in customs and culture between different countries, and about her own life as a parallel to Rwanda's development.

When Global Business Services (GBS) firms choose new delivery locations, they look for stable governance, conducive regulations, reliable infrastructure, and workers with the right skills. Rwanda already tops Africa’s charts on governance, regulations, and infrastructure. And the Government has now begun an initiative with international development partners to train a large pool of GBS workers.Oriane and I discuss Kigali’s GBS ecosystem, and she introduces EF’s English language training pilot, which is tailored to GBS agents and free of charge for any GBS firms.

Rwanda's progress over the past three decades has turned this small country into one of Africa's newly emerging technology hubs. Global Business Services (GBS) companies have recently set up delivery locations in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, and Joseph Semafara is a leading figure in providing these investors with a "soft landing." His company, SOLVEIT AFRICA, trains young graduates to become GBS agents. Together with other training providers in the Kigali ecosystem, Joseph works closely with the firms that are already in Rwanda, and with firms that are currently on the cusp of making Kigali their next delivery location.In our conversation, Joseph and I discuss how Kigali‘s ecosystem of digital services exports has changed over the past 2-3 years, and what this seems to have unleashed for Rwanda.

Africa is full of young people who see the internet as their ticket to a better life. Adewale Yusuf, a Nigerian tech entrepreneur, saw this continent-wide drive as an opportunity to connect African workers, mainly programmers, with global clients, mainly tech companies – all remotely. For this, he built TalentQL, a platform that acts as a wormhole – transporting African coders into the borderless realm of the global digital market. But he realized that more was missing than the mere connection between the supply and demand of digital work. Few applicants were ready to deliver the services that global clients needed. So, Adewale did what entrepreneurs do, he founded another company: AltSchool. AltSchool is a learning platform for software engineers, product marketers, and data scientists – remotely.In our conversation, Adewale and I discuss whether the pre-Covid world of cities and offices is turning into a post-Covid world of video calls and long-distance learning circles, and what roles young Africans might play in such a world.

The University of Oxford is home to the Oxford Internet Institute. Behind the blue door of a townhouse, too many researchers from around the world scramble for desks as they try to makes sense of life in the digital era. In his room on the third floor, Vili Lehdonvirta saw something in the data that gave him an idea he couldn’t shake. So, he did what academics do, he wrote a book about it.Lehdonvirta is Professor of Economic Sociology and Digital Social Research, and we spoke about his book, Cloud Empires, which, as of 27 September 2022, can be picked from shelves of bookstores and clicked from the warehouses of empires.Vili traces the cyberlibertarian endeavours of using technology to free us from the shackles of coercive states. He shows how moving fast, breaking things, and with constant in-flight fixes, platforms like eBay, Silk Road, Upwork, Uber, Amazon, Apple App Store and others ended up becoming the very thing they set out to escape: states; often coercive ones at that. He shows how these platforms now have more in common with 13th and 14th century empires than with the libertarian utopias their founders sought to create. They are states based not on territorial jurisdiction but on membership.We discuss if earthly governments can still reign in these empires, or whether they might become virtual democracies one day.