The following piece was originally sourced from the article “Lessons from Africa,” published on Kellogg’s News & Events page.
GE Africa Chief Financial Officer Thomas Konditi addressed a crowd of students at Kellogg School of Management’s Africa Business Conference. In his keynote, Konditi said that people from outside Africa often picture a homogenous social and business climate in the continent and rarely take into account the diversity of its nearly 60 nations.
“Morocco is as different from Malawi as South Africa is from the D.R.C.,” said at last weekend’s conference, hosted by the Africa Business Club. The conference took a look at Africa through the lenses of entrepreneurship and investment.
“We chose Mr. Konditi because as CFO of a global business in Africa, we felt he could provide a broad overview of what it takes to conduct business across the continent,” Conference co-Chair Nene Antonio ’14 said.
Konditi, who happens to be Kenyan-born, shared his experiences at GE Africa, a business that has been experiencing 30 to 40-percent growth each year for the past several years while generating about a quarter of all the power in Africa. As CFO, Konditi specifically oversees sub-Saharan Africa finance, capital markets, financial services, treasury and tax support for the $2 billion operation across 14 countries.
Throughout his speech, Konditi continually restate the importance of local, ground-level knowledge needed to work in Africa. He said companies often start with a one-size-fits-all approach for Africa before realizing the nuances needed to make headway the second-largest continent on the globe.
“You are going to end up being local,” Konditi said, alluding to the inevitability. “How are you going to do it?”
