As a result, many corporations develop explicit rules to ensure that minorities -often discriminated in the society- get an equal access to job and to promotion than the rest of the applicants.

One of my American clients showed me the various categories who receive a special attention: physically less attractive candidates, gays and lesbians, older candidates, ethnic and religious minorities…

But how would these ‘Western’ categorizations fit into African subsidiaries?

Let us first examine the physically less attractive candidates.

How challenging this must be to categorize a candidate into this group! Using my imagination, I believe that these who set this category had in mind these who are overweighed or who lost a limb or have very apparent scares on some visible parts of their body.

Might these people be in the USA or in any other Western countries, they might indeed suffer from discrimination when applying for a job or for a promotion.

But would it be the case in an African country?

Being overweighed is an asset in many African countries. This proves that the individual has a social status that enables him/her to eat at will. Overweighed women are often associated with feminine beauty.

In Africa, these who lost a limb or have any other sorts of disability are usually benefitting from a special status in the society. In many places, Africans do business out of their disability. Begging is a job like any others! Some work in the informal sector and can get leading roles in developing networks and gangs. Others are successful business owners. In top of this, disabled Africans are rarely alone and therefore they can be taken care of by their extended family.

So it needs to be verified that people belonging to this group would ever apply for a job in these corporations.

Let us move to the category of the gays and lesbians.

This category is the one causing problems to foreign corporations. As a matter of fact, homosexuality is considered a crime in many African countries. Negative feelings and persecution of homosexuals are such that President Obama made the respect of gays and lesbians an ongoing part of his messages during his successive speeches to African countries.

Each time, media report on this topic, Africans’ reactions are massively against Obama’s statements.

It is very difficult for a Western mind to understand this resistance to accept homosexuality. Therefore Westerners believe that they should insist in order to have gradually Africans changing their mind about the topic.

There are some cultural explanations to Africans’ stance and without due understanding of it, no progress can be expected.

The specific attitude to homosexuality in African societies does not necessarily evolve when Africans immigrate to Western countries. The topic remains taboo as told me a Paris based Ghanaian HR responsible working for decades with a large French corporation. My conversation with this person made me feel that accepting homosexuality was to her equivalent as accepting incest!

Discrimination towards older employees would not happen in Africa as these are the most sought after experts! Age and seniority are enough to silence anyone younger! These older employees cause problems to younger African educated as socially they must listen to the elders and not contradict them.

Ethnic and religious minorities are often not well integrated into African organizations and this in spite of some political speeches stressing the need for unity in diversity. While conversations with each side showed that there is a need for more diverse work teams, the reality is disappointing. The key factor is how to build trust in collective and diverse societies? So far, American recipe (diversity training workshops) to handle diversity at home has not proved to be effective in non-individualistic societies.

Corporations setting an African subsidiary or in search of African partners in the value chain may be unaware of the cultural inappropriateness of their transferred diversity policy.

The disrespect of African beliefs (for example regarding homosexuality) can infuriate locals to the point that it annihilates the benefit of foreigners’ cultural adjustment to the local protocol and communication style!

Besides, the blind transfer of the diversity policy assumes that the listed categories are the only ones featuring potential discriminations. This is far too limited. In many African countries, there are other categories that should be added to the list of potentially discriminated minorities.

To be on the right track and maximize the chance of success in Africa, ensure you get an overview of how cultural differences will impact on your diversity policy!

The new image that media but also international consulting firms wish to convey is that of steadily improving African economies and of reduced poverty. Through such arguments they wish to convince their audience that Africa is the new paradise for international investors.

Top ranking list of GDP growth for the first decade of the 21st century features countries such as Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Chad, Sudan, Zambia, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Nigeria, Mauretania, Mali, Sierra Leone, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Uganda, DRC.

Reports on amazing growth rates (22% GDP growth for Ghana in 2011), but also emphasis on the growing size of the middle classes and on the rising urbanization of African populations aim to have readers inferring that African consumers now wait for new products and services to be available.

As African economies are still very dependent on agriculture, the availability of goods and services means massive imports. So far foreign telecommunication global actors but also giants in the food and beverage industries have done well in Africa. Their success might reinforce the validity to link economic indicators with juicy economic perspective for foreign manufactured goods and services.

This is great news for international businesses that face over-capacity in depressing European and American economies.

Nevertheless, let us be cautious before linking growth rate and rising market size. While the link may be relevant in some countries, there is a need to verify that it is the case in Africa.

Higher wealth creation usually means higher redistribution of wealth by governments. Increased resources from taxes, incomes and other activities give the opportunity to better financing the provision of public services. Among those services, education and health play a major role in ensuring that populations improve their quality of life. As a matter of fact better qualified and healthier workforce means better salaries and subsequently higher purchasing power.

Therefore there is a clear relationship between populations’ higher purchasing power, the qaulity of public services as well as the quality of the country governance.

With regards to good governance, top ranking African countries with amazing growth rate do not do very well!

Many of them are classified in what is known as Failed and Fragile States.

Failed States are countries where the government is unable to provide security, basic services or decision making capacity in substantial parts of the territory over which it is legally sovereign. They are further characterized by largely ungoverned areas, warlordism, poorly functioning economies, rampant corruption, violence, dislocations such as refugees and internally displaced persons, and lack of loyalty from portions of their populations. They are especially vulnerable to lawlessness, criminality, dissolution and violent upheaval.

Fragile State is a first stage towards failed States.

In his report on ‘Engaging Fragile States- an international Policy Primer’, Michel Lund includes Angola, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Congo-Brazzaville, Djibouti, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Nigeria, Liberia, Mauretania, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea, Kenya, Equatorial Guinea, Niger, Zambia and Uganda as among the most-failed group.

Surprisingly many of the failed States feature African economies with very high economic growth. This implies that doing business in these places requires foreign actors to deal with weak governments and corrupted civil servants who take their personal interest before these of the population they govern and provide services with.

Local African newspapers operating in places where media are relatively free or online African media feature numerous ongoing cases of embezzlement from corrupted civil servants and other government officials. Anti-corruptions offices seem to have little influence on this type of criminality. In some African countries, employees would quit a job in the private sector to take a job in the public sector as this one happens to be juicier!

Subsequently African populations might not benefit from better economic indicators and the current huge disparity of wealth in African countries may mean that foreign businesses may not find the forecast large market share for their products and services

Equipped with their effective recruitments tools and techniques as well as with their experts’ long experience, they rarely challenge their approach to both clients and prospective candidates. When I am saying this, I just mean that they take recruiting as a process that effectively works when following a rational step-by-step approach. But is recruiting effective when relying on a process?

Let us examine this step-by-step process and try to see what happens when a recruiter relies on imported and universal approaches to recruiting.

In my today post I am focusing on the first step taken by recruitment services providers: the definition of the right candidate

During this initial step, recruiters carefully listen to their client’s needs. Through such exercise, the client either defines the candidate’s profile or give some technical information enabling the recruiters to shape it in terms of job category, functional area, industry, education and experience.

At this stage already, numerous cultural preferences emerge that are rooted into the client’s corporate or societal cultures: for example, it is notorious that US firms care less about candidates’ formal degree than about their previous achievements. A good candidate does not need to hold a degree from a prestigious school, nor does this degree need to be a phD for the candidate to be appointed to the highest level of responsibility! US firms can easily appoint an achiever in an industry that the prefered candidate is not familiar with. The logic behind this point of view is that the candidate’s past achievement proves that the person has the required skills and that those can be transferred in another industry without any risk being taken.

However, in some African countries, the possession of an academic title or of a specific degree is highly valued. In these places and according to the job to be done, it might be preferable to hire a candidate who has a less impressive track record of achievements but who has the credentials to quicker build trust with both local subordinates and third parties. Additional strategies may be needed to ensure that such person achieves as expected.

Real added value implies that the recruitement service providers be aware of the cultural preferences of both their clients and those that are locally valued. They should be able to anticipate the cultural clashes that a mismatch of preferences can cause on any selected candidate and they should devise an appropriate strategy that could help the client in dealing with such challenge.

Beside, other factors rooted in the context will shape what await the candidates: they ultimaly affect the definition of the profile.

Let us examine one of them!

In some African countries, a manager’s functional authority competes with other internal sources of authority and influences. This means that during the course of the tasks and activities performed within the firm, the decision-taker’s autonomy of action can be more  limited than in any Western context. A manager in a West African country had to listen to his driver who was closed to an important religious authority and could penalize the manager for taking a decision that was not right according to his own expectations.

Similarly in Southern Africa, I have known cases where traditional authorities had the final word in the decision making process and this is spite of having a lower status than the functional manager.

More broadly speaking, publicized recruitment of local executives often show that other criteria than functional expertise, knowledge of the industry, diploma determine who is an appropriate candidate. Might some Westerners believe that these are political choices, they might often be wrong.

In front of such complex cultural context, it becomes dubious that the Western logic derived by the ‘professional’ approach to recruiting be useful or effective in African coutntries whendefining the right profile.

Foreign recruitement services providers may believe that they avoid such a trap by having local recruiters in their local teams.

Yet this avenue is not an easy one!

First of all, local recruiters in Africa are deeply shaped by their own education that uses Psychology as a lens to develop recruitment approach, techniques and tools. When culture rather than Psychology is needed to understand how to solve problems and define profiles, local recruiters do not easily challenge what they have learned. Many foreigners involved in edudation throughout Africa often complain on how hard it is to have local students criticizing ideas or challenging what their trainer/teacher said. This phenomenom is likely rooted in the way Africans are expected to behave in the classroom from their formative years onwards.

Another factor adds to the difficulty to challenge ideas: in many African countries, there is still an admiration for the Western life style and for Western education. It is therefore a pride for many Africans to state that they use well known techniques and tools and that they administer tests that are developed abroad (often in the USA). Such ability reinforces local recruiters’ status and credibility towards foreign clients.

Robert Nisbett, a professor of cognitive Psychology uncovered that Americans do not pay enough attention to the context when exposed to a situation. The proliferation of their human resources management tools and techniques across the globe may therefore continue to let others believe that recruiting is a process that follows a universal logic!

Only a deep understanding of the local context can lead to the developement of effective recruitment approaches!

Achieving this objective is a challenging task; as a matter of fact, human resources issues have proved to be strongly affected by societal cultures. This means that in some countries, other criteria than competence and expertise rule processes such as selection, recruitment, promotion as well as the handling of all other human resources issues.

A preference for other criteria often has an underlying logic. For example, in some societies, trust should exist from the start and a new employee’s past achievement alone does not guarantee that the person will be trustworthy or that he/she would act in the company best interest.

Overlooking such a societal expectation can cause negative outcomes. For example, the person recruited on the basis of his/her competence can be sabotaged by colleagues through information retention. I have known a foreign CEO who had to reluctantly get rid of his competent human resource director whose work was boycotted by his colleagues. They belonged to different ethnic groups. Conflict was not open, which made it very hard to bring the different actors to a negotiating table and fix the problem.

Tools and procedures aiming at fostering the respect of diversity can also be diverted from their original aim.  A multinational I have worked with had created an anonymous phone line enabling people to lodge a complaint, might they witness some employee not abiding by the firm diversity policy.

Quickly numerous calls came in, overloading the receivers with numerous investigations. At the end of the day, these investigations led to the discovery that there was no breach of the firm’s diversity policy. Callers were disappointed by their foreign hierarchy’s refusal to hire a relative or by jealousy and frustration. In another example, the local expectations related to subordinate hierarchy relations made it impossible to report any discrimination by fear of retaliation through the use of witchcraft.

Another factor that is often overlooked in foreign developed diversity policies is that diversity means different things in different places.

In some African countries, there are additional categories of people who can be discriminated. For example, women can be discriminated according to their status of being single or being married. According to the job that they will perform, it can be more productive to select a married woman than a single one. Might the more competent person be single, additional support should be brought for the single person not to be hampered to succeed in her endeavors. These measures can be useful within the firm but they will not remove the possible negative image that a single woman can print into clients or other stakeholders.

Foreign firms operating in Africa should be aware of the strong aversion for homosexuality in the continent. Openly revealing that the firm policy supports the recruitment homosexual employees or makes it acceptable to reveal one’s gender orientation can trigger disastrous outcomes not only within the firm but also outside.

In many African countries, disabled people have a special status. Their job often consists in begging and they can make a very good income through their activities in the streets. Nobody would consider them suitable for a job in an organization and on the other side very few disabled people would want to or even engage in any studies enabling them to do other things than begging. In such context, insisting on hiring disabled people may just not be understood by the local populations nor by prospective candidates.

These few examples show the challenge of transferring global diversity policies into foreign contexts.

Legal issues are only a small part of the job when ensuring the suitability of diversity policies across the globe.

A thorough analysis of the societal values and expectations can uncover the challenges of transferring global policies into each country.

In a number of situations, local expectations will hamper diversity policies to reach their objective. Full awareness should be made of this situation. Local support and adjustments could help human resources departments in supporting talented employees to unleash their potential in spite of the hostile societal environment.

Knowledge management can also help in setting local best practices in this culturally sensitive matter.

At working with Africans, we can help you in effectively transferring your global diversity policy into African countries.

The question for these foreign firms is often phrased as followed: ‘what are the scenarii to be taken into consideration’ when dealing with the local people and for each of these scenarii, ‘how to get prepared to handle the human side of the interactions’?

Let us examine various situations through the example of a foreign estate agency setting up a subsidiary in an African country.

Might the foreign company transfer one of its foreign employees to run the African subsidiary, a great precaution should be taken not to judge to quickly what needs to be done. It is not uncommon to find newly arrived foreigners assessing that the local staff is not qualified or not professional and to immediately enroll them into a sales or leadership training session.

Often these judgments are made on the assumption that clients have similar expectations when it comes to being served. This is totally inaccurate: cultural preferences exist and they need to be taken into consideration. It is important that the foreigners take time to assess the local preferences and that they do not assume that there is only one professional way to sell/rent an estate or to behave as a manager.

In order to assess the cultural adjustments that are needed, foreign estate agencies should take into consideration the various segments they cater for. For example, in many African countries, local estate agencies cater mainly for the expatriate community and provide them with both private residences and offices.

The expatriate community is very diverse and can feature people from all around the world. While local estates agencies may have learned over time how to satisfy these expatriates, they often approach the clients the same way as their local prospects. They are unaware that trust building, selling arguments, expected involvements and communication style differ across cultures. What works with a local prospect may not work with a foreigner.

Besides, often local sale personnel have never travelled and know very little about some of their foreign prospective clients. They would often cluster Westerners in one group of people sharing tastes, concerns, and needs! This is far from being true! Local staff can learn about the different situations and tasks where they will be faced with cultural differences. In each of the situations, they can learn how to adjust.

Foreign estate agencies may wish to serve the local indigenous community as well and offer their services to people who had previously never used an estate agency.

In such case, a foreign manager may also believe that the local staff needs to behave more professionally with the local prospective clients. Extreme caution should be taken before wasting time and money in a professional training as a seemingly unprofessional approach to a prospect by a foreigner’s eye might only mean that there are different ways to be professional when serving prospective clients.

In top of this, it is as much important for foreign estate agencies to learn about the cultural specifics of their diverse prospective clients as about these of the local landlords.

As a foreigner having lived in various African countries for 20 years, I have come from surprise to surprise as to how differently landlords can act and react before, during and upon leaving an accommodation that I had rented.

As a summary, a good preparation to handle the human side of the work synergies prevents many misunderstanding and waste of time and money.

At working with Africans, we help foreign firm in developing a cultural advantage over the local and international competition!

In such a context, African subsidiaries of foreign multinational firms are keen on exposing their African talents to an international experience. While a decade ago, they would have sent these Africans to their headquarters in Europe or in the USA, they now increasingly transfer them for a short term assignment in a subsidiary located in a different African country.

For these talented Africans, it is often a very first experience of living abroad. It is also the first time that they get a chance of being involved in a cross-cultural preparation.

As I train multinational employees both in Europe and in Africa, I have become aware of how critical these cross-cultural preparations are for the Africans. While European or American employees have all been exposed to cultural differences during their holidays abroad, Africans are not in the same situation.

Many of them have even never crossed the borders of their home country, either because the trip is technically too challenging or because it is too expensive.  As a matter of fact, people living in countries where competition is fierce get a chance to fly for the price of a train ticket to the next city.

Such situation is almost never the case in Africa where a 2 hour fly may cost more than a transcontinental flight when the destination is the monopoly of one or sometimes two different airways. The low demand makes it necessary to compensate for the empty seats with prohibitive fares for these who fly!

Discussions with these Africans venturing for the very first time elsewhere in Africa are useful for both the cultural services providers, for the trainees as well as for the multinational human resources departments.

Trainees who thought that not much would change when crossing the borders and working for the same firm are surprised that corporate values seem to be understood differently in a foreign subsidiary. This confuses them as they tend to believe that their way is the best way.

They also tend to act and react the way they do at home with sometimes catastrophic consequences. Recently one of my trainees admitted having done a faux pas and regretted that his cultural preparation had taken place so late (several months after his arrival).

Besides, little if nothing has been written on intra-African cultural differences in the field of business anthropology.

While I have gathered some piece of information , done research and interviewed Africans over the last 20 years, my knowledge needs to be enriched and completed with more systematic intra-African comparative studies. Funding agencies and research institutes should be sensitized to this need. So far they have funded research elsewhere in the world. They should now prioritize Africa.

With roads being constructed all over and with African countries being made accessible and open to intra-African trade, it is time for their people to learn what separate them culturally from their neighbors.

This is not a natural exercise for Africans who have the tendency to search for similarities when they approach other people. It is a reflex in group-oriented societies to look for commonalities: this reinforces the group cohesiveness.

On the other side, looking for differences and for categorization of people and situations is a typical and natural approach in individualistic societies (Western societies). Differences are interesting in individualist societies.

However they can threaten the social cohesion in group- oriented societies.  Such natural propensity has been fine as long as African countries have lived with little or no contact with their neighbors.

However as economic integration has become a reality, the development of cross-cultural competences becomes a ‘must’ for Africans: otherwise they could spoil their chance of successful inter-African business synergies.

Cross-cultural training should be made available not only for privileged and talented Africans working with multinational firms but they should also be available to African small business owners, traders as well as to all these who directly or indirectly are involved in international technical cooperation.

Cross-cultural awareness training would also enrich the knowledge of the cultural diversity existing beyond Africa. So far comments and reading suggest that Africans know very little about the diversity of cultures elsewhere in the world.

Rather than stating what a culture is all about, cross-cultural training develops the ability to maneuver the cultural differences that separate the involved stakeholders.

Let us make them available to Africans!

All too often the change literature draws on the premise that psychology is the main avenue to understand people’s attitude towards change. The same discipline is then used to devise how to effectively and efficientlly support the change process.

Interestingly, change management is very much influenced by the societal values of the place where change is brought about.

Psychologists themselves have admitted the limitation of their own field: more than two decades ago, Bruner, the father of cognitive psychology, acknowledged that culture appears as an equally valid explanation for understanding people’s attitudes and reactions. Cultural psychology is a sub-discipline that looks at these cultural differences.

Unfortunately a number of change management experts have not updated their knowledge and continue to propose an approach to change that relies on universal human tendencies.

This makes it especially dangerous as more and more change is brought about globally. Transferring an effective change recipe in a different subsidiary or imposing a foreign partner to swiftly change may lead to unexpected and or undesired outcomes.

Reality shows that when some cultural specifics vary from the context where a successful change story has taken place, the effectiveness of the change tools and techniques might be drastically reduced.

Let us illustrate this:

Comparative anthropological research has proved that across societies people showed different attitudes towards change. In the Dutch business anthropologist G. Hoftstede ‘s work, the parameter that is related to the attitude towards change is named ‘uncertainty avoidance’.

It makes sense to believe that in a country that scores low on uncertainty avoidance, people have a tendency to faster accept change than in countries that scores high on the same parameter. There might be a number of reasons why people are comfortable or uncomfortable with the unknown that change brings about.

For example, people who believe that they have little impact on the outcome of their actions might not bother change as they may take it as destiny. In such case, there is no need to implement a sophisticated change management support as the stakeholders might accept change without any resistance.

However when this cultural specifics  is associated with the reference to the Past as a model of action, change may be very deeply opposed to. In many African societies and organizations, people interpret attitudes, actions and reactions following a non-Western rationale: bad spirits or revenge from angry ancestors may cause people to act or react in a specific way.
Bringing about change not only challenges the model of reference but it also can be interpreted as an intention to hurt others. Asking someone to change an attitude or a practice can cause people to believe that the change agent is ill intentioned because under a bad spirit’s influence.

If we add to these two cultural parameters another one, the situation gets even more complex : in societies where the group is the reference for shaping the identity, there is a pressure towards social conformism: in other words, the whole group surrounding the change agent can pressure him/her not to implement the change. According to the weight of the cultural parameters, the change agent may or may not succeed.

Resisting the social pressure can cause social ostracism, which can be enough a reason to give up with any healthy change from an economical standpoint. Most African societies feature the group as the model for shaping the identity.

These few examples make it clear that change management cannot be delivered in one recipe.

However with change management literature drawing so few case studies from African contexts, it is hard to challenge current change management techniques and tools.

Decades of cross-cultural co-operations in the fight against poverty have enabled researchers and practitioners to accumulate an enormous amount of information on cultural specifics of each African country. Yet little of that has been influencing management education in Africa. Most change literature locally available is Western-centric or imported.

If so many actors have gained some expertise in African cultural specifics, should we bother about the universal recipe proposed by the change management literature? Wouldn’t these people adapt the change recipe to the cultural specifics of their work setting?

That is far from being sure!

As a matter of fact, most African countries are new actors in the global economy. For very long they were conducting business and running organizations with a rationale that had nothing to do with that of the market economy.

With the influx of foreign direct investments, Africans are willing to fill the education gap: developing competences, skills and knowledge has become their priority to compete in the global economy. With no indigenous model of change being openly acknowledged, they entirely rely on foreign literature and on foreign models of references.

They often blindly take any foreign skills training programs proposed by local or foreign organizations. American training products are especially valued. Confronted with the challenge to implement these foreign recipe they find no other reason that their incompetence for explaining their failure. Yet admitting the failure openly would just challenge their status and therefore they rather keep quiet. Ineffective change approaches and techniques will continue to be taught and developed as long as culture will not take a bigger place into business and change management education.

In search for information, some foreigners contact me with detailed questions such as these: ‘ Is there any gender discrimination in this or that job market? Can my spouse expect the range of salary that she/he gets at home? How should foreign females behave with their African colleagues and superiors? Are there taboo topics of conversations? Can my pregnant wife hide her situation when applying for this or that country?’ and the likes…

These questions are logical as the newly recruited person has approached his/her prospective job with the same concerns.

The situation of trailing spouses in African countries is poorly understood by prospective workers and foreign employers alike!

It is a fact that competence and experience are very important criteria when it comes to recruiting people.

Yet in Africa, these are not the only criteria and foreign spouses may be wise to consider the following:

The Work Permit

One of the prevalent topics of conversations among trailing spouses is their struggle to get a work permit. It seems as in some places and for some positions, it is just impossible to get one, whichever the scarcity of skills and competences that these spouses are featuring.

Why?

Many African countries have adopted a stringent regulatory system that strictly limits the number of work permits granted to foreigners. Priority should to given to nationals. Often such approach has been initiated by foreign NGOs and international aid agencies. Some NGOs are proud to have their local office entirely staffed by indigenous.  These organizations have devoted much effort in funding local capacity building as well in organizing training workshops. Many foreign organizations have also granted bursaries and fellowships to their promising African employees who take time to go and study abroad. On the other side more and more foreign universities set local antenna in some African countries and fly their teaching staff according to the local needs.

As a result a pool of educated indigenous get the jobs that otherwise would have been given to expatriates. Often these jobs are paid according to a salary scale that takes the local conditions of the job market into consideration.

The increasing number of qualified local workforce is however not always enough to meet the organizations’ needs.

Some welcome applications of qualified foreign job seekers. In such type of scenario, the organization applies for its foreign recruited employee’s work permit.Yet this does not guarantee the success of the endeavor. I have witnessed numerous spouses who had to quit their new job as their employer was informed of the refusal to grant the work permit. This can take place even when there is no evidence that a national has the required skills!

Other factors can interfere and affect the decision made:  often that are tied to the specificity of the local job market or to the cultural expectations of both employers and work permit granters.

For example, in South Africa, there is a regulation that encourages employers to recruit and promote indigenous Africans. Through a system called ‘scorecards’, employers are monitored and can be penalized for hiring too many non- indigenous Africans, being South African nationals or foreigners.

Elsewhere, employers may express preference for recruiting nationals because there is a known pool of local talent. This is increasingly the case in Kenya and in Nigeria where education is highly praised and where competition is fierce to access the best local schools and universities.

Even when there are not enough local talents, more and more local authorities or organizations wish to see educated and experienced nationals living and working abroad to repatriate.

For example the Ethiopian government has regularly called its emigrated citizen to return and bring their know-how to help developing growth in their former country.

The Angolan government is also pushing foreign businesses to develop local capacity in such a way that in a near future, most positions in foreign firms be held by indigenous workers. Foreign firms may look favorably at this prescription as it will reduce their costs: Luanda, the capital of Angola is the most expensive city in the world.

Such picture may sound gloomy for prospective foreign job seekers.

Nevertheless this does not mean that it is impossible to get an interesting job locally or that it is totally inconceivable to get a work permit. This raises the second factor that foreign spouses should be aware of:

The local approach to being recruited…

While many African countries feature recruitment agencies that are structured the same way as elsewhere, the way they operate may still be influenced by the local expectations and mores. This can be confusing for foreigner job seekers especially if the recruitment agency is a subsidiary of a famous foreign firm. They might approach these firms with the same spirit and strategy as that they would use at home. This may be ineffective!

Besides, the use of standardized professional recruitment procedures, but also the use of interviewing techniques does not mean that recruiters will not interpret them according to their societal expectations and values.  In a previous post found under the link http://www.workingwithafricans.com/recruitment-across-countries/   I gave some illustrations of these interpretations.

Foreign spouses might find it effective to learn the local expectations and procedures. This includes awareness and ability to adjust to the local way of building trust, to adjust to the local communication style, as well as the right attitude and demeanor during the whole process.

Specific cross-cultural training can help them in developing their skills!

Finally foreign spouses might be interested in knowing that some jobs do not require a work permit or that some firms can find some arrangement to make working possible.

The little attention drawn to these issues cause many frustrations. For G Sawadogo from the World bank, firms and organizations should pay attention to this issue. So far very few employers do, which can potentially impact on their recruited employee’s own performance.

While they are right and I rather propose a training session focused on a specific country, there is a legitimate claim in getting a general overview of what it is to living and to working in Africa.

Why?

Over almost twenty years of exposure to living and working in different African countries but also discussions with foreigners make me envision that foreigners based in Africa are going through a number of common challenges.

As a result, an effective cross-cultural training based on the continent can help in uncovering and addressing the scope and the depth of the cultural differences. Subsequently they can decide the best strategy and implementation.

In this post I would like to raise a common challenge faced by foreigners who are living and working in Africa.

Geremy Sawadogo from the World Bank surveyed expatriates in Africa and found out that the biggest challenge that they meet is related to the use of time.

In numerous sub-Saharan countries, expatriates complain about facing hard time in enhancing productive work practices. It is a fact that people face some challenges related to structural problems (erratic supply of electricity, bureaucracy, corruption, lack of expertise…) but there is more than that.

In many places, the way indigenous approach situations and problems is engrained in a vision of the world that is very different from that of many foreigners. Failure to understand this way of thinking does not trigger any questioning on how foreigners must adjust.

Foreigners and some trainers may think that the cultural adjustment is linked to respecting the local social and business etiquette but I am afraid  that is a far too limited view.

As a matter of fact, when indigenous do not believe that’ time is money’, it is likely that they have developed an approach to building trust, to making a deal and to fixing problems as well as to dealing with people that features their own perception of time.

Whenever foreign businesses set in an African country, they transfer in that environment the way of thinking, the way of organizing work, the way of dealing with employees and clients that are ingrained in their own vision of the world as well as in their own perception of time.  It is not difficult to envision that there will be a cultural clash!

How to handle this?

This is a type of situations that foreigners may not have come across when working in a different part of the world.

It is very complex since such situation uncovers the real challenge of cross-cultural work interactions in Africa: reconciling opposite ways of thinking and working.

Can foreign businesses and organizations adhere to a different use of time? If yes, can they always do?

I have some information that suggests that foreign business do not always endorse the local cultural values and perception of time.

By doing that, they are aware that they disrespect the local cultures.

In some other aspects, they are willing to respect the local cultures but the daily challenges that they face confuse them: how to know what they should respect and what they shouldn’t?

They might learn it over time as a result of a trial- and- error process. Yet this might be rather costly and ineffective exercise.

Let us reflect on a foreign business willing to delocalize a production unit based in a developed country because the manpower is too expensive. If it is a fact that African manpower will be cheaper, but there will be unexpected productivity issues that will emerge from the clash of perceptions of time. At the end of the day, the delocalization in Africa might not be the best way forwards. It might also be that is possible but only under specific conditions that need to be known well in advance. Not knowing anything about this challenge can lead to catastrophic consequences.

This example demonstrates how useful it is for an organization to anticipate the scope and depth of challenges when working in this specific part of the world.

Organizations and businesses that request some training focused on the continent might have heard from others that there are specific and common problems faced by foreigners who work in different African countries. It is therefore legitimate to be willing to anticipate them.

People and experts who attempt to discourage these people to look at the continent may be unaware of the complexity of work interactions in this part of the world.

Those who wish to impose a traditional model of cultural preparation that describes African values and impose foreigners to endorse them may be unaware of the low added value of their work when their trainees will face situations that threaten the viability of their endeavor.

For decades, structural adjustment programs have forced African governments to reduce public expenditures. Education has suffered from this constraint on African government budgets and today, locally trained and educated Africans rarely meet the standards that foreign firms and organizations expect for their staffs.

The current mismatch between the supply and the demand of qualified indigenous human resources has pushed foreign firms that are present in an African country to seek candidates abroad.

Privileged Africans who either have studied in private and/or foreign educational institutions are highly sought and often they get numerous offers to work at home or in other African countries. Candidates foreign to Africa, complement the pool of qualified human resources who are offered good jobs to work in Africa. This is often perceived as frustrating by the locally trained and educated human resources who cannot compete with them. Educated Africans from other countries and foreigners are getting the job that they should get!

The migration of well educated and trained Africans and foreigners is not a long term solution to the shortage of qualified indigenous human resources.

Therefore the need to rapidly develop and train local resources has triggered reflections, suggestions and actions.

With the ubiquitous presence of the Internet, e-learning has emerged in many African countries as the fast track to fill the knowledge and skills gap.

International agencies have seized this opportunity and they have poured much money into making e-learning as widely available as possible in many African countries.

While an outsider might rejoice at this initiative, a view from the field uncovers the real challenges ahead.

Let us examine the situation:

1. Challenge linked to the context where e-learning is transferred:

In spite of the marketing message of the numerous Internet services providers operating in African markets, the end product is still disappointing for many users. Ubiquity and broadband Internet do not mean anything if the provision of the services is slow, interrupted by breakdown and power outages. It is unfortunately the case in most countries and this on a very regular basis…

How could workers perform their learning experience when Internet is down at the moment they need it or when it takes forever to download a document that contains a picture or a diagram?

1. Challenge linked to the learners

With most of the literature in Education being Western centric, most e-learning courses have been designed on the basis of a perception of learning that is rarely seen by the designers as culturally- limited.

Recently a global leadership strategist for e-learning acknowledged her effort to cure American companies of the bad habit of exporting training courses (particularly e-learning) to other countries without regards for cultural differences.

Nevertheless for a while now, a literature awakens to the cultural differences in cognitive skills and in learning styles. Professors, teachers and trainers in educational institutions that feature a cultural diversity of learners, begin to adjust their approach to training to the cultural expectations of their students and trainees. The literature mainly focus on Asian learners but as J Sawadogo pointed it in his paper on ‘Training for the African minds’, there is a reason to believe that the American view of training and learning might need to be adjusted to make learning effective when addressing African audiences.

For example, an effective learning experience in an individualistic society is different from an effective one in a group-oriented society. African students/learners may feel very lonely in front of their e-learning course:  they may only provide an effective work when they are mentored by a real teacher/trainer and when they can learn with their peers.

Group-oriented learners rarely challenge the learning or the knowledge. Confronted to e-learning tools, they may reproduce this attitude and subsequently blindly apply concepts and know-how without verifying their effectiveness in their own working context.

As I have witnessed in numerous situations, e-learning tools do not give any explanation as to why a proposed way of doing does not work. Subsequently, learners confronted to the first challenge of implementation may just give up with their learning experience!

Subsequently, e-learning course designers do not get any feedback and do not improve their product to suit their audience’s specific cultural needs.

1. Challenge linked to the products

Today, learning is not only taking place in academic and vocational institutions but also in training centers and firms run by business people. Both academics and business professionals develop skills and competences.

While academics are encouraged to keep abreast of new findings and to adjust their learning accordingly, people running training centers and trainers working for them may prioritize business profit on costly adjustment of their learning products.

Subsequently, it may not come as a surprise that training firms that witness low profit with their e-learning products in some markets may wish to penetrate new ones.

The debates on the effectiveness of e-learning courses have raged for some time. A discussion on the professional virtual platform LinkedIn recently brought several hundred of comments from trainers on a discussion whose objective was to understand why e-learning had failed.

This may be interpreted as e-learning being at the end of the product life cycle in some Western countries and that subsequently, rather than reinventing more effective learning tools, it may be more profitable to export them to African markets.

In this context, it is important that all stakeholders be fully aware of the challenges ahead and that appropriate solutions be found to help Africans in developing appropriate skills and competences.