Africa Supply Chain in Action 2020 (#ASCA2020) is Africa’s collaborative response to Supply Chain Management and Procurement of the future. It is an online continental gathering with purpose! The event will focus on ways to Adapt and Thrive for the New Tomorrow.

Join our GBSH Consult Group Executive Chairman as he presents a keynote at the landmark event on: Africa's Growth Agenda and the Global Pandemic: Managing the impact on procurement for resilience and growth

Washington DC, London, South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Dubai, Israel– GBSH Consult Group and JT International Holdings are partnering to help organisations and leaders transform and focus on new business agility and resilience strategies in the post-COVID economy and the future of work. The partnership will take full advantage of their joint business agility proprietary technologies, leading skills development, SHEQ solutions and advisory services to help companies transform and unlock new revenue streams, increase productivity, improve customer experience and reduce costs. Working together, the two companies will launch a new set of tools and services that will help enterprise and small business clients re-define how they engage with customers.

JT International Holdings today announced the company's varied departments partner with GBSH Consult Group as an authority in the global market to provide clients with the combination of consulting services and top-notch technological innovation solutions. "Coming together with GBSH Consult Group on their strategic partnerships demonstrates our commitment and combines our industry-leading expertise with another market-leading technology firm" said the JT International Holdings CEO. "We're excited to welcome JT International Holdings to our partner community. "By offering a hybrid approach with GBSH Consult Group, JT International Holdings can deliver whatever solution works best for our customers-on-premises or virtually whilst maintaining the unique approach we have in our stable. Scaled agility and accelerated innovation are strategic imperatives required for C-suite executives, Boards, Investors, and Entrepreneurs today" said JT International Holdings CEO. "By partnering with Tier 1 and 2 firms worldwide, we offer customers the best-in-class technical and strategic advantage they need under one umbrella, making it easier to deliver on these objectives. "GBSH Consult Group will continue to be the go-to company for organizations and businesses looking for high quality consulting services and solutions that span the entire process. From legal holds, procurement, supply chain and global data collections to legal review and production" said H.E. Prof. Dr. Ambassador Tal Edgars, Group Executive Chairman, GBSH Consult Group.

About JT International Holdings JT International Holdings (JTI), headquartered in South Africa, RSA is a diversified holding company dedicated to acquiring, managing and operating manufacturing, advisory, and management consulting facilities across Africa and abroad. We seek opportunities to acquire and grow businesses that possess strong brand values and that can generate long-term value, sustainable free cash flow, and attractive returns in order to maximize return for all stakeholders. For more visit https://www.jtiholdings.com

Media Contact JT International Holdings

Sales effectiveness— find more, win more, keep more customers to drive sales growth. Do you find yourself lying awake at night, mind racing with questions and concerns about your job or organization?

It is normal for most Entrepreneurs, industry captains and even employees to stay up late thinking through how to find and cultivate opportunities to grow their own practice or to help our clients grow their businesses.

There’s a common thread to questions that keep all of us awake and that our clients say also keep them awake:

How do we find more, win more, and keep more customers?With new competitors coming into the market, do we need to rethink how we work with our clients and/or identify net new customers?Should we double down on our current products and services or focus on innovating new ones?

Ever used WebMD to self-diagnose an illness? Let’s apply the same thinking to diagnose your organization’s growth challenges and help you start getting more sleep at night.

Marketing effectiveness — Get the right message to the right customers at the right time to drive the right leads to your sales team

Common Symptoms:

Budgets continue to be reduced but expectations remain high, so how do we do more with less?How do we improve our speed to market on all fronts — content generation, campaign execution, product launches, etc.?Do we truly understand our customers at a detailed enough level to be most effective in our demand generation activities?

When to seek assistance:

If you don’t have the technology or systems (e.g., content management, campaign automation, lead tracking, etc.) in place to enable your marketing strategyIf you aren’t getting the expected results from investments you have already made in marketing, leading executives to question the value that marketing is providing to the organization

Treatment options:

Sales effectiveness— find more, win more, keep more customers to drive sales growth

Common Symptoms:

I’m spending money on training and technology for my sales team, but I’m not getting the results I expect.My sales team seems to be ’farming’ old business and struggles to ‘hunt’ net new business.We aren’t hitting our goals, but our sales compensation payouts are still higher than they should be.

When to seek assistance:

Your sales growth has declined or stagnated for several quarters and you aren’t sure whyYour best sales team members and leaders are leaving the organization, and it seems to be more and more difficult to attract top performersYou’ve spent money on sales training and development, but haven’t seen a change in the behaviors of your sales team

Treatment Options:

Self-diagnosed? What should you do next?

Hopefully, this discussion has helped you self-diagnose your company’s growth challenges. Contact us to assist you with more self analysing methods and tools.

It is notoriously difficult but not impossible for start-up companies to raise capital. Having met many interesting, inspiring and intelligent people over the years, new entrepreneurs with fantastic business ideas but who fail at the first hurdle. It is important to set out the common mistakes they make. Firstly, it is important to state clearly that one does not need money to start a business, what one needs is an abundance of determination, a great business idea, tenacity, ability to work hard and a belief in the business model or idea . You will need some money but not as much as most people think and one certainly does not need to raise money first before you start working on the business. Most budding entrepreneurs think they need to raise money immediately and often try to secure funding long before they are ready, no surprise that they fail woefully.

Raising funds especially in the midst of a global economic recession is tough and it has certainly sharpened entrepreneurs’ focus towards their business plans and shifted the routes they take to raise cash at seed level. Yet we still encounter businesses that massively over-egg their revenue projections, many are still at concept stage, most have no contingency plan and the valuations placed on the business by business owners and founders are, at times, hugely over exaggerated. It leads to many businesses simply not being ready for outside investment.

Sandown Corporate UK and GBSH Consult Group work with a number of businesses across Africa seeking to raise capital whether as seed capital, working capital, equity finance, equipment finance or debt finance. We match investment opportunities with investors seeking viable, credible investment opportunities in Africa. Admittedly we work with very few start-ups as venture capitalists and institutional investors rarely fund start-ups although some do. Those who do are called Angel investors. An angel investor or angel (also known as a business angel or informal investor) is an affluent individual who provides capital for a business start –up, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity. A small but increasing number of angel investors organize themselves into angel groups or angel networks to share research and pool their investment capital, as well as to provide advice to their portfolio companies.

Here are some tips for first time entrepreneurs or Start-up companies.

Finance it yourself

Find a way of financing the business yourself (between the founders) to start trading. This is important for many reasons:

By self-funding, you are able to create real, tangible value in the business, so when you begin talking to outside investors you have a more valuable proposition. This helps your negotiating power and should result in you getting a much more positive equity-for-cash deal. It also demonstrates that you believe in the business thus you are ready to invest in it yourself, how do you expect others to invest in your business when you are unwilling or unable to do so yourself. Friends and family are usually the likely people to reach out to. Sell what you have to raise money a car, jewellery etc. Raise seed capital yourself.

Talking to investors before you even have a product or service offering is not only crazy but certifiably so. You are asking the investor to take a huge risk, as you cannot prove any kind of track record or even that there is a market for your product or service. Have you tested the market? Can you prove that people want to buy your product or services?Investors are less enthusiastic about financing a business from seed without some form of proof that you actually have a marketable product or service.Investors like entrepreneurs who have staked something in the business themselves . If you have nothing at stake to lose, then you increase the nervousness of the investor and they will be much less likely to invest in you.

Find Great People

You can’t do it all on your own. People make businesses...

You’ve heard all the clichés before, but they stand up. Through existing contacts and networking find other great entrepreneurially minded people to get involved in the strategic side of the business. Whoever you decide to bring into the business, ensure they have the right skill-sets, experience and contacts that fill an existing gap.

Keep Overhead Costs Low

As a start-up business, you are forced to be prudent with costs. How many times have we heard people say that they need to raise funds and when asked what they need the money for, they provide a litany of operational costs, first we need to get an office and get staff?An investor will shut down the conversation before you have finished speaking.

You have effectively demonstrated a total lack of business acumen, before the business is even off the ground you want to start incurring costs without having generated a single penny. A sure path to failure if ever there was one. Ramping up and increasing your overhead costs is dangerous and puts huge pressure on a business, especially if it’s pre-revenue.

Running out of cash is the quickest way to fail. In this digital age, you do not need an office at the early stages , work out of home and build up the business and then when you generate enough profit , invest in an office and staff but only if you have to. It is all about profits not a swanky office and a pretty P.A.

Be Professional

Just because you need to keep costs down does not mean that you should not invest in a good website, with corporate emails , a professional business card and business stationary.

Perception is key , how on earth do you expect anyone to take you seriously if you are unable to present yourself professionally to potential customers or investors. With the advances in digital technology it no longer costs an arm and a leg to have a professional website and marketing materials. Be smart and invest, do not try and cut corners and do not think it does not matter, it does. How you present yourself and your business makes a real difference in your ability to attract

customers and potential investors.

Always have a Plan B

So you have an idea for a business but as you begin to develop the business you realise that there is more of an interest or a market for one particular service or product. Drop the others and concentrate on the one product or service that sells…..smell what works and stick to it. How you think the business will evolve and where you think success will emanate when you start out quite often is not how it turns out., Be prepared for that and be flexible enough to change when you need to.

Entrepreneurs can be stubborn. It’s a great characteristic to have but a lack of flexibility or unwillingness to change direction when needed can lead to abject failure. Live by the following rule: if it doesn’t work, analyse why and fix it. If it still is not working, change. Quickly. This does not mean a complete re-think of business strategy, product and vision but it probably does mean changing the proposition and finding new ways of achieving success.

Focus

Entrepreneurs are naturally visionaries, creative and ideas driven. There is a danger sometimes of developing too many services, new products /services or different income streams at once , off-shoot products and services to help drive engagement and revenue. Meanwhile, the core product or service that you are building your business around has yet to be exploited fully and developed to its full potential. A focused product /service development plan is essential, just make sure the new service or product you want to develop alongside the main one improves the existing product/service and does not diminish it. Being brilliant in one thing is better than being good at five but not brilliant at any. Jack of all trades, master of none as the saying goes.

Forecast realistically

If you think your business will be turning over 10m USD two years after start-up, think again. The biggest failure of most start-ups is unrealistic forecasting, a failure to take into account operational costs.

Most business fail within the first 6 months of inception as a result of this.

Inserting big revenue numbers into a Profit and Loss account may look awesome but it could lead to failure. Some entrepreneurs do not know the difference between turnover and profit. So you have managed to sell over 100,000 USD of goods, products or services in a month.

Does this mean that your business is worth a million Dollars? The answer is a resounding No. This is your turnover and is not a reflection as to the viability of the business nor can it be used to value the business. Turnover vs profits: When all operating costs are computed i.e. all the costs you incur in the normal course of business and this sum is subtracted from the income generated/Sales , the sum left over is deemed to be profit. Also remember to deduct any tax that would need to be paid on monies generated.

A business is one that generates income; a good business however generates profits from sales that can be re-invested. So you have generated income, great, some entrepreneurs erroneously then think that they can then try and find an investor at this stage and happily boast about sales but all investors are interested in are profits and what the operating costs are. You will soon find this out fast as you find that you can no longer afford your overhead cost, which leads you to consider laying off staff, desperately begin talking to investors, who sense your desperation and lack of business acumen and are unlikely to invest which inevitably leads to you going bust and your company becomes another statistic.

Don’t waste time talking to investors before you are ready. Your business needs you working on it 24hrs a day 7 days a week. Not out of the business, losing focus trying to raise money.

Build your business, begin to trade and test your market, reach all of the goals and objectives you set yourself at the start of the journey, begin to get on the path to generating meaningful revenue, get great people on board and guess what? You’ll find that you won’t need to go knocking down doors, investors will come to you.

And guess what else? The value of your business and your negotiating power will sky-rocket. You must be able to demonstrate that you have been trading consistently for at least 12 months. Ideally investors prefer you to have been trading for 3 years with financial accounts that reflect year on year profits no matter how small. It is at this stage that a business will be considered stable and investment ready to attract Venture capitalist and institutional investors.

For seed capital however and to attract angel investors at least 6-12 months may be realistic. There are survival milestones entrepreneurs need to bear in mind, first 6 months, first year and then 3rd year by then you are deemed to be stable, by the 5thyear there needs to have been significant growth and you can begin thinking of expansion and bringing in huge capital investment. If you survive to the 10th year, celebrate.

Knowing how much to raise

When you are ready to raise capital, do not ask for more money that you need. There is nothing more disheartening than hearing a business owner tell you they want to raise millions of USD in capital and they are unable to provide a breakdown of what the money will be used for or unable to justify a fraction of the funds they want to raise.

Show investors you understand your business and marketplace. Have a bankable business plan with financial projections that are realistic. Do not ask for 2 million USD when you only need 500,000 USD.

Ada Maduakoh is a Director and Senior Partner, Sandown Corporate Ltd . An international trade and investment consultancy based in the UK with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. For advice on how to raise capital or how to become investment ready contact our team.

Sandown Corporate Ltd is an affiliate partner of GBSH Consult Group.

This article originally appeared in a 2014 exclusive interview with MSME News Network Malaysia featuring the GBSH Consult Group Chairman H.E.Dr.Ambassador Tal Edgars

As of 2013, Africa’s population stood at 1.111 billion and with steady population expansion on the continent, African governments and friends of Africa are expected to be considering new ways and contemplating new solutions to cope with the anticipated population boom, and using it to oil the wheels of growth and not allow it to become an unavoidable burden.

The SME sector could make this happen.

Even though accurate figures are unavailable as a result of the unorganised informal SME industry in Africa that outnumbers the formal arm, SME has been described as the most realistic sector to consider for creating more than enough jobs for Africans now and future. This is not surprising because SMEs in Africa are multifaceted. They exist in various sectors for various categories of professionals, cosmopolitan which present everywhere and pluripotent as their potentials are not yet fully tapped or harnessed. However, many African SMEs are struggling for survival instead of being the real engine of economic growth in Africa.

Ambassador Dr. Tal Edgars, a leading authority in the substantive dialogue on entrepreneurship and Africa Rising, noted that in the midst of the numerous setbacks, there is a growing wave of grassroots self-starters in Africa that are taking risks and defying obstacles to bring their money-making ideas to life. The self-starters are armed with a can-do attitude and hopes of striking it big. The self-starters are navigating a conundrum of challenges to pursue opportunities at a time when many African countries enjoy unprecedented levels of economic growth.

Assessment of entrepreneurship in Africa

The entrepreneurial landscape in sub-Saharan Africa is excellent. Its emergence and booming economy make entrepreneurship in Africa to be on the increase. Several African countries are starting to really increase entrepreneurial activity and move to opportunity entrepreneurship, rather than necessity entrepreneurship. Opportunities abound and a positive spirit is emerging amongst the population of these countries.

“I was so pleased earlier this year, when Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) published its annual report looking at the state of entrepreneurship globally. GEM found that sub-Saharan Africa is the region with by far the highest number of people involved in early-stage entrepreneurial activity (TEA - Total early-stage Entrepreneurial Activity), with Zambia and Nigeria leading the world rankings,” Dr. Edgars said.

Since The Economist labelled Africa “the hopeless continent” about a decade ago, a lot has changed. Labour productivity has been rising. It is now growing on average of 2.7% per year. Trade between Africa and the rest of the world has increased by 200% since 2000. Inflation dropped from 22% in the 1990s to 8% in the past decade. Foreign debts declined by a quarter, budget deficits by two-thirds. According to the World Bank, in the past ten years, sub-Saharan growth has been more rapid than East Asia's (though that includes Japan).

From hindsight a generation ago in Asia, relatively small increases in capital produced large productivity gains. When, after decades of capital starvation, outside investors started to take that disproportionate return seriously, they helped Asia blossom. Africa’s blossoming could be due to the same reason.

In financial centres such as London, barely a week goes by without an Africa investor conference. Private-equity firms that a decade ago who barely knew sub-Saharan Africa existed raised US$1.5b for projects on the continent last year. In 2010 total foreign direct investment was more than US$55b which is five times what it was a decade ago and much more than what Africa receives in aid.

Africa's demographic dividend, too, is far from guaranteed. A growing population and a bulge of working-age citizens proved a blessing in Asia. But population growth always has its costs. All those extra people must be fed, educated and given opportunities. If illiberal policies obstruct growth and discourage firms from hiring, Africa's extra millions may soon be jobless and disgruntled.

Fund challenge for African SMEs

“Just to bring this to context, African entrepreneurs are running on empty,” Edgar pointed out while referring to an estimate by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) that about 84% of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Africa lack adequate financing.

Africa is plagued by a credit financing gap worth US$140b to US$170b, a credit financing gap worth approximately 17 times the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Burkina Faso. Inadequate financial markets coupled with poor access to traditional growth capital (debt and equity) remain exacerbated by insufficient infrastructure, regulatory measures and government policies.

What could work and is already working in some African countries including South Africa and to some extent Nigeria is equity financing such as venture capital and seed funding. They can offer entrepreneurs business expertise alongside capital; providing a support system that some may otherwise lack.

Dr. Edgars added that “There is a need to initiate local venture capital investing ecosystems to ensure that the most appropriate sources of funding are available for sustainable business development.”

Key to success in entrepreneurship

For entrepreneurs in Africa and other parts of the world, the essential ingredients for success in entrepreneurship are focus, competence, and passion.

“Multiply them together, and you have got a measure of a company’s stick-to-itiveness. And because adherence is a multiplicative function and not an additive one, a zero in any one of those three areas means that the company can’t stick to anything at all,” Dr. Edgars told MSME News Network.

Furthermore, effective business planning and strategy is critical to an entrepreneurial company's long-term success and its ability to raise capital and grow successfully. As a result, bankers, accountants, consultants and academics have written volumes about business plans. Yet, it seems the more information there is, the more confused people become. There's no one right answer. A properly prepared business plan should tell a story, make an argument and conservatively predict the future. All companies have different stories to tell, different arguments to make and different futures to predict, so they must resist the temptation to copy from others or to follow a rigid outline.

Global potentials of entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurs provide one of the main engines of growth in any healthy economy; they act as vital agents of change by developing new products and services, implementing more efficient production methods, and creating new business models and industries. They also generate jobs, support local communities and build prosperous societies.

For all these reasons, Dr. Edgars believes there is already a growing recognition of entrepreneurs’ importance across the Group of 20 (G20). Many countries have introduced a range of programmes and policy initiatives to help boost entrepreneurship.”

Reducing failure risks in entrepreneurship

Using South Africa as a case study, he submitted that providing more credit and more training would not guarantee success for African SMEs; he said their survival is dependent on whether government's strategies for supporting the SME sector and the kind of support being offered are appropriate.

According to him, small enterprise support is quite narrowly focused on issues such as access to credit, training and reduction of red tape. This often misses the wider market constraints confronting SMEs as a result of the structure of the economy.

He recommended that labour laws should be simplified for SMEs, promotion of governments’ SME support programmes, and integration of SME roles into strategic thinking on trade and industrial policy.

While Africa’s economies are often dominated by government and large corporations, the real engine of economic growth may be small and medium-sized enterprises.

“By adding technology to their operations (ICT) two economic “drivers” are brought together and sparks may fly. You may even get a significant productivity “jump”,” the expert pointed out.

What makes a good African entrepreneur?

Features of a good African entrepreneur are not different from those in other parts of the world. A good entrepreneur is someone that has the following features: tenacity, passion, tolerance of ambiguity, vision, self-belief, flexibility and rule-breaking by defying conventional wisdom.

Solving unemployment challenge

Africa’s private sector has a central role to play in solving the issue of unemployment mostly among the younger generations. Young people represent about 35% of Africa’s working age population and joblessness has hit them hard. While the unemployment rate, for instance in Ghana, averages about 8.7%, it is as high as 31.7% among the young generation. The situation is even worse in Sierra Leone, where youth unemployment is 52.5% against the national average of 10.2%.

More and more young graduates are coming onto the job market. The number of graduates in sub-Saharan Africa more than tripled between 1999 and 2009; from 1.6 million to 4.9 million. And that figure is almost double to 9.6 million by 2020.

The private sector creates wealth and jobs. More than that, Dr. Edgars advises that governments and other institutions should involve the private sector in development.

“It is not given enough attention to see how it foresees development,” he said.

This piece originally appeared on The CEO Zimbabwe: Back to Work Exclusive with Chairman of GBSH Consult Group H.E.Dr. Ambassador Tal Edgars

Africa economies are on the move and the continent has the second fastest growing economy in the world in the past decade. The acceleration in Africa’s growth over the past ten years reflects fundamental improvements in in the overall macroeconomic landscape, country political stability, and the business environment. Africa is beginning to harness its natural wealth and sectors growing rapidly include local services such as retail, banking, transport and communications, manufacturing and agriculture.

Poverty is on the decline with around 90 million African households having joined the consuming classes by 2011. Income inequality however remains unacceptably high and although it is falling in only about half of African countries. Africa has a workforce of 382 million with 42 % of the workforce being employed outside agriculture and 28% earning a wage versus a 24% margin in the year 2000.

Africa’s growth needs to beinclusive if it is to improve human welfare and ensure increasing social and political stability. In most countries economic growth reaches most people through employment income, so the challenge is to ensure that the economic growth translates into stable wage-paying jobs. Most countries in Africa have the potential to create stable employment to absorb the growing potential labour force.

Depending on the source, Zimbabwe’s unemployment rate has been estimated as low as 4% and as high as 95%. The real level of unemployment is almost impossible to gauge as countless Zimbabweans are making a living in the informal sector and outside the country. This shows that the government needs to step up processes and policies that can create more jobs and more so create a labour force that can contribute to the country’s GDP.

WHAT ARE THE BARRIERS TO JOB CREATION?

For most businesses the barriers to job creation revolve around macroeconomic or political instability conditions. Notwithstanding the improved and faster economic growth within the region, businesses still show concern about ;insufficient demand, potential threat of inflation, access to finance, shortcomings in infrastructure like electricity, transportation and internet.

There is no simple solution to boosting job growth in Africa. I believe with targeted reform programmes, governments can eliminate these barriers and unleash private sector growth.

A robust GDP is a necessary condition for accelerating the creation of jobs. National leaders on the continent need to ensure that the improved macroeconomic and political stability of the past decade is maintained. They should also pursue macroeconomic reforms that create a more attractive business environment. However focusing on GDP growth alone, will not be able to transform Africa’s employment landscape or ensure inclusive growth and wider opportunities for Africa’s people.

To harness growth for job creation, Africa’s leaders should focus on reforms to the business environment in the labour-intensive sectors that have the potential to create a large number of jobs.

A job strategy is very far from the broad based industrial policies that have more than often proved ineffective in countries around the world. Africa’s development needs are vast and national economic plans can often be hundreds of pages long. Many well-meant reform programmes enact numerous policy changes but have limited practical success. I believe that a more pragmatic approach is to remove all obstacles to growth end-to-end in specific industry value chains and then build more broadly on this narrow head start theorem.

Examples that have successful done this include;

Morocco which consolidated its growth in 2013 with GDP rising 4.7% compared to 2.7% in 2012. Sound macroeconomic and fiscal management has continued while a cautious monetary policy held inflation at 1.9% and the current account deficit at 7.2% of GDP, compared to 10% in 2012, while foreign exchange reserves reached 4.5 months of imports of goods and services. The new aeronautical and automobile industries represent an important source of economic growth and innovation for Morocco.

In India there has been a huge growth of IT companies which have in the first instance taken advantage of the growing Indian market and also exported there products to overseas markets. Foreign owned companies were also allowed 100% ownership to provide funding for the booming industries in the country and these companies were critical part in providing capital and know-how in the earlier days of India’s economic growth.

Mali’s integrated investment in road, rail and other transportation to facilitate mango exports and Morocco’s two free trade zones for automotive companies are examples of targeted infrastructure tailored to specific industry opportunities.

Nigeria’s telecommunications sector is estimated to have generated up to 3 million jobs in the absence of the state telecom monopoly.

In Angola, Africa’s second largest oil producer, major investment is being made to expand access to electricity, water and transport and infrastructure development, leveraging off the oil revenues in the country. To boost business, financial sector policies are being modernised with the introduction of a new foreign exchange currency law for the oil sector and a mining law.

WHAT ELEMENTS SHOULD AN END-TO-END STRATEGY HAVE?

In order to boost grow and generate jobs, end to end strategies should have these six elements:

Identify one or more labour intensive sub sectors in which the country has a global competitive advantage or enjoys strong domestic demand, and can create a large number of jobs.Improve access to finance for businesses in those sub sectors by providing incentives for the banking sector to increase lending, educating new borrowers and opening access to foreign investors.Build suitable infrastructure to support economic activity in these subsectors and in the geographic mosaic regions needed for success.Cut unnecessary bottlenecks in regulation, corruption and bureaucracy, all of which raise the cost of doing business and limit growth and investment.Public-Private Partnerships: Strong collaboration through the public and private sectors, to ensure a steady pool of workers with the education and skills needed in those targeted subsectors.Execution.

Another country that has successfully created an enabling environment for job creation is China which has added well over 300 million jobs predating to 1980. Several factors have assisted in this development including rapid growth in manufacturing, increased urbanisation, and improving education and skills attainment that has prepared children for non-farm work. Over the past decade, close to one quarter of China’s employment growth (33 million jobs) was in the manufacturing industry. Many of the jobs were labour intensive. China migrated into the production of higher value-added and knowledge - intensive goods and have become the biggest producer, and consumer of high value technologies. The country invested heavily in primary and secondary education, including in the rural areas, preparing its children to join the modern workforce. By 2010, 60% of the workforce had at least a secondary education.

India created 67 million non-farm jobs over the past decade, just over half the tally in China. Gross exports in India amount to 22% of the GDP, compared with 30% in China.

The lesson from China is simply that to create jobs, countries should focus on labour-intensive export sectors and from India, the lesson is to create products firstly for domestic demand and then export.

For these countries and other growing economies, the SME sector has played a major role in creating jobs. Governments that have supported the Small and Medium sectors have reaped enormous rewards in terms of innovations and job creation as well as positive contributions to the GDP.

The policies to grow the SME sector must be able to create a conducive business environment for them to thrive. These are generally reflected in; Strategic support to the SME sector, Institutions supporting business development must be visible and accessible in all areas, Support for beneficiation of SME products, Simplification of labour laws for SMEs, Promotion of government SME support programmes and Integration of SME roles into strategic thinking on trade and industrial policy.

Youth unemployment is an emergent and perennial problem in many countries in Africa and the increased internationalization of labour markets and flexibility of labour relations, with the traditional cycle of school-to-work-to-retirement giving way to more varied patterns of employment provide a new context for this problem.

WHAT ARE THE STRATEGIES TO DEAL WITH YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT?

The best approach to dealing with this challenge is to outline youth policies and programmes that address:

Promotion and introduction of the self-employment option including a boost in EnSkills trainingBusiness counsellingMentor supportFinancing of youth projectsAccess to work spacesBusiness expansion supportCreating support networks andMultifunctional youth enterprise agencies.

In order to generate more jobs in such sectors as agriculture, tourism, mining, manufacturing, technology and retail, Africa should have clear policies that encourage ease of investment in these sectors.

In order to make agriculture more productive, there should be expansion of large scale commercial farming on uncultivated land, shifting from low-value grain production to more labour-intensive and higher-value-added horticultural and biofuel crops. Growth in agriculture should be used to develop downstream agro-processing industries.

To grow the manufacturing sector the country needs to understand the sources of potential comparative advantage it holds in the global market, identify the specific manufacturing subsectors in which it can compete, and then begin to remove the blockages that have prevented these subsectors from reaching their potential.

The main barrier to expanding wage-paying employment in retail is the prevalence of tiny informal stores and cheap imports. Another major barrier to the expansion of modern retail stores is a lack of or expensive commercial retail space. Strategy to grow this sector include moving retail and consumer good companies upstream for owners to become anchor stores or co-invest in formal retail space. A perfect example is the South African grocery store Shoprite.

Africa needs to overcome barriers to growth in the tourism industry including inadequate and costly airfares, visa requirements, and unreliable local airlines, expensive hotels compared to the region, poor surface transportation and poor uncoordinated marketing of the country.

Construction of hotels is very costly and even if the infrastructure is improved, the industry needs to explore how it can boost the length of stay and spending per stay to increase revenue and create more jobs.

To create more jobs, Africa needs an innovation-led, knowledge-based approach to improving the policy environment in the continent. Keeping in mind that there is no “quick-fix” there are areas in which concerted action can generate forward momentum, and overtime make a sizeable difference for growth and job creation. They are deeply couched in the following areas:

Encouraging Foreign Direct InvestmentAccelerating privatization of loss making public entitiesTargeted investment incentive schemesDevelopment of the SMME marketLabour market flexibilityEducation and training policies need to fill the growing “skills gap”.Targeted employment subsidiesAccelerating rural development

The continent needs to create a cross functional task force to create and execute the jobs plan and strategies. Private sector business leaders can help identify the most pressing blockages to growth in their sectors and to measure the success of overcoming them. This should also be supported by broad civic engagement.

For more on how to create a job creation strategy or implement one. Get in touch with the GBSH Consult Group.

GBSH CONSULT GROUP is proud and delighted to announce that it has been named under 5 category wins this year at the ACQ5 Global Awards 2015 by Acquisition Finance Magazine (ACQ) in UK, which recognizes the exceptional capacity of our expertise in the field of strategy, advisory and management consulting practice. We are thankful to those clients and colleagues who nominated and voted for us and assure and undertake to continue providing high-quality strategy, advisory and management consulting services.

ACQ, a premier global award recognition, released the results of its ACQ5 2015, and the entire GBSH Consult Group, is proud to announce its selection for the following awards:

UK – ADVISORY TEAM OF THE YEAR- GBSH CONSULT GROUP

SOUTH AFRICA – LEADING CONSULTANCY FIRM OF THE YEAR FOR A CONSECUTIVE YEAR, GBSH CONSULT GROUP

SOUTH AFRICA - MANAGEMENT CONSULTING FIRM OF THE YEAR - GBSH CONSULT GROUP receiving the highest volume of nominations in the category

SOUTH AFRICA - GAMECHANGER OF THE YEAR, H.E DR. AMBASSADOR TAL EDGARS - GBSH CONSULT GROUP receiving the highest volume of nominations in the category

SOUTH AFRICA – STRATEGIC CONSULTING FIRM OF THE YEAR – GBSH CONSULT GROUP

The total number of nominations received stood at an amazing 32,966 representing a 27.7% response rate. (Our highest ever)

"Exceptional individuals, teams and firms across the marketplace represent the very best in their field from around the world and truly deserve the accolade of being an ACQ Award winner. All category winners are in effect, a brand. In one sense, perhaps the most important sense, a brand is a promise. You know what you're going to get with a well-branded product or service. It takes a lot of time, money and very hard work to build and maintain great brands, brands that can speak volumes in just a few syllables. It's shorthand for what you are." said Jake Robson, Editor in Chief of ACQ.

The marketplace is changing quickly, with greater external pressure and competition, so it’s good to see that all ACQ Global Awards 2014 / 2015 winners are showing no signs of complacency. Far from it, this year's nominations show that the market continues to spearhead solutions that allow it to stay at the top of the game.

“In GBSH, we are not merely about the wins, but the losses. The loss of one business not changed, one mind not conquered and one heart not touched. Our agenda is to seek the socio-economic transformation of Africa as whole and this we believe is a step in that direction. Then again, I am a member of a team, and I rely on the team, I defer to it and sacrifice for it, because the team, not the individual, is the ultimate champion. My team have the winner’s quality and every day I am grateful for their collective consciousness that brings about the change and transformation in everything we do and offer. Never would anyone have wished for a better team” , said GBSH Consult Group Chairman H.E.Dr. Ambassador Tal Edgars.