by Lars Stork, Managing Director Future Africa

Telecoms operators and vendors doing business across Africa are entering unchartered terrain with this conjuncture of profound crises, the fallout from the financial crisis will be severe. People are being faced with a deep sense of insecurity; misery and hardship will increase for many poorer people everywhere. The movements will grow further as recession starts to bite and economies start sinking into depression.

We need principles of transformation, perhaps more than at any other time in our history, to produce good news. These principles must now come to the forefront of our thinking. We must study them, be innovative, talk about them, work together and exchange results, network, pass them on to others, and so forth. Only principles of transformation will produce the good news that we long to hear.

The global financial crisis becomes “a human crisis.” Nowhere is this truer than in Africa. Although spared the first-round effects of banking failures, Africa is already facing the second-round impacts of declining capital flows, slowing remittances, stagnating foreign aid, falling commodity prices and export revenues, African currencies are and will be bound to devaluation . The continent will almost surely experience a deceleration in growth, and if history is a guide, this deceleration will have an adverse impact on commercial growth and people development.

Crisis management requires well thought through transformation and a fundamental re-thinking on how operators and vendors do business. Turning the effects of the global financial crisis into a positive might seem farfetched however if businesses take the actions required fast with a very structured approach and not treating the current crisis as yet another firefighting project or business as usual, that ends up with fixes normally just scratching the surface. Organizations must now use the current crisis as an ideal opportunity to drastically transform their businesses enabling survival and ultimately be stronger for what happened.

Future Africa a newly established Consultant and Interim management firm has developed a powerful two step approach that significantly will increase the success rate of the transformation journey including providing required implementation support.

The Vision of Future Africa is to share our knowledge and experience to help African organizations build capability at all levels. This will include strategic planning, organizational transformation, business model re-design, coaching for development of leaders; staff capability building, change and process management, supported by “best of breed” functional expertise and best practice project management methodologies. A winning formula for African businesses. For more information visit http://www.futureafrica.com

Photo by world economic forum. Used under the creative commons 2.0 license.

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Tags: crisis management, foreign aid, global financial crisis, telecoms operators

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 6:58 am and is filed under Industry Editorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.