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“A lot is changing. The voices of Africa are becoming more pronounced. There is insistence on Africa being taken seriously by Africans themselves, and Africans are trying to assert themselves and not only say the right things but also be seen to be doing the right things”
Ferdinando Beccalli-Falco
“We spent the last 25 years saying that, look, we are a private business, we do private business things. You are the government, stay out of the way. And then this crisis happened, and all of a sudden we come across the fact that governments, after all, have a role to play”
Helen Clark: The three-term Prime Minister of New Zealand, entered the UN with two preoccupations that are likely to inform her work: trade and climate change PHOTO: AFP/Getty Images
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“I’m not interested in anything that’s small in scale. We should not be in anything that is not capable of having system-wide impact”
Put communications at the heart of development
Dr Hamadoun Touré is an ideas man and when he is in full flow, they come out thick and fast. The secretary general of the International Telecommunications Union of the United Nations is endowed with a genuine belief that at the heart of all solutions to the world’s development challenges is information and communication technology; from the Millennium Development Goals to climate change.
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“Many Western financial institutions are leaving Africa because of a shortage of available funds… What we have been doing here in Africa, and other Chinese banks have been doing here is a natural choice, and it’s a choice made on a commercial basis
World Economic Forum
“There’s no good in prentending that Western business for the past 100 years has been a pillar of light. But if our behaviour has got better, it’s because we’ve learned it’s in our long-term interest”
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“The G8 and G20 have influence, but they don’t have legitimacy. They have influence because they are big economies, they meet once a year, make decisions that affect people who are not invited to the table. If you are going to reform the system, it has to be based on universality”
Using technology to transform the water market
As one of the few information technology companies with a continuous history of more than 100 years, IBM is a company that is familiar with adversity and the need for innovation.
From its beginnings in India in 1999, Bharti Telesoft has ridden the wave of mobile telephony in developing markets to become a global provider of services to telecoms operators. Now it counts more than 100 clients in more than 70 countries, 30 of which are in Africa.
In his new offices just over a mile from Downing Street, Tony Blair cuts a far more relaxed figure now than in the final days of his 10 years as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It is just shy of 18 months since Mr Blair left Parliament with the words: “I wish everyone, friend or foe, well – and that is that, the end.”
Finding mutualities and accepting that sometimes good business goes hand in hand with CSR is key to Diageo’s success in Africa.
When James Mwangi was promoted to his current post of Chief Executive of Equity Bank in 2004 he inherited a technically insolvent building society. Founded in 1984, Equity had struggled to compete in an underdeveloped Kenyan financial sector dominated by South African and international banks.
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