The indicators are everywhere: there is a high risk of massive economic upheaval. Look at the US stock market, look at inflationary elements across economies, look at global energy prices as Russia remains sanctioned, look at the political stasis in Nigeria on currency deterioration, and feel global hunger, triggering banditries, riots and breakdowns of order. People, the global economy is going through a huge redesign; PREPARE.

As a school, Tekedia Institute works hard to provide practical knowledge to our learners. We’ve introduced a new course – Personal Economy Scenario Mapping (Nigeria, Global) – to help our members plot how to overcome this impending paralysis. During Covid-19 pandemic, we did the same thing, sharing playbooks to overcome a pandemic,  and many in our community appreciated it.

For working professionals and companies, I have put some directions here. Yet, we need to discuss the matters and prepare very well.

On Saturday, May 28 at 4pm WAT, Tekedia Institute will organize a Zoom session on Business and Personal Economy Scenario Mapping During Economic Upheaval. This is an open webinar and everyone is invited.

• Time:  Saturday, May 28 at 4pm WAT
• Presenter: Prof Ndubuisi Ekekwe, Tekedia Institute
• Zoom link: click here for the Zoom link

Later, during Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 8 (begins June 6, 2022), we will share Business Continuity Policy and Playbook courseware as part of the program. If you want to get the courseware, register for Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 8 here or join any of our other programs here.

Note: Tekedia Industries, Tekedia Practice, Tekedia Startup Masterclass, etc members, you will see the courseware in your class Board once we run it in Mini-MBA.

World’s richest nation getting poorer

Tens of millions of Americans are beginning to grapple with the implications of a plummeting stock market, writes The Wall Street Journal. The S&P 500 just registered its seventh week of losses. Countless stocks, bonds and other investment assets are “getting hammered.” As the losses mount for even casual investors, families are confronting the helpless feeling of watching investments intended for a car or house downpayment, a child’s college tuition or their own retirement slowly sinking each day. The bruising period has rendered financial industry prognosticators “as lost now as they were when the pandemic recession hit,” reports Bloomberg. And JPMorgan Chase estimates at least $5 trillion of collective wealth among Americans has been lost so far this year, a figure that could hit $9 trillion by the conclusion of 2022. (LinkedIn News)

Time for Scenario Mapping – Huge Nigeria, Global Dislocations Coming

Tekedia New Course: “Personal Economy Scenario Mapping (Nigeria, Global)”

Pan African fintech app, Bamba has raised $3.2 million in a seed funding round led by Venture capital firm 468 Capital. Other investors who participated in the funding round include Presight Ventures, Jigsaw VC, and angels Mato Peric, Leonard Stiegeler, Laurin Hainy, and Thomas Stafford.

Founded in 2022 by serial entrepreneur Bastian Gotter, Bamba is a mobile application focusing on simple tools for merchants to manage their customers, record stocks, receive payments, and access cash advances against their future cash flow.

Bastian Gotter is not new to the African terrain. He has been active as an entrepreneur and an investor. He co-founded iROKOtv with Jason Njoku way back in 2010 and also partnered with him in 2013 to launch SPARK, a $1 million venture that will invest in Nigeria’s most talented tech entrepreneurs Nigerian startups. He left IROKO in 2017 to pursue other interests. He has since been behind the scene but active as an investor.

Bastian Gotter, CEO of Bamba, said the fund will the company to scale its business to new markets.

“We truly believe entrepreneurship is essential to prosperity, so we make running a small business easier by building mobile-first small business software for Africa. This investment allows us to scale the platform and the team and gives us access to insights from our high calibre of investment partners,” he said.

Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises account for 90 percent of all businesses in sub-Saharan Africa and contribute more than half of all jobs.

In 2021, registered and unregistered merchants accepted over $250 billion in mobile money payments, recording rapid growth. The mixture of receiving/paying out cash or mobile money creates new complexities for merchants; however, it also creates opportunities to further digitalize business payment and record-keeping processes.

Speaking on the investment, Ludwig Ensthaler, Partner, 468 Capital said: “We are thrilled to invest and support the team and vision at Bamba. We feel that the investment opportunities in “enterprise” software focused on small businesses in Africa are significant and remain largely untapped. We believe that Bamba is well placed with a great product and a solid founder to build a category-defining company.”

This digitalization process has the potential to vastly improve access to credit, one of the most significant hurdles preventing the growth of small businesses in Africa. The IFC estimates Sub-Saharan Africa’s small business credit gap at $331 billion, and Bamba’s mobile application sits at the heart of the digitisation process, improving both the payments experience and the access to credit for micro-merchants.

Bamba’s CEO noted that the company is currently in stealth mode and will use the new capital to build out its mobile product offer, scale its engineering team and expand its user base across 12 sub-Saharan African countries with high mobile money penetration.

As 2022 moves closer to its first half, Africa has continued to see an increase in tech investment, erasing the groundbreaking investment records of 2021. Tech funding in Africa grew faster than any other region globally in 2021, reaching a total of $5.2 billion, according to private equity firm Partech.

The African Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (AVCA), which promotes private investment on the continent, wrote in a report that “African startups raised more in 2021 alone than the preceding seven years combined.”

The growth has been attributed to the success of companies like Nigeria’s Paystack, acquired in 2020 by U.S. payments firm Stripe for $200 million, and fellow fintech Flutterwave, valued at over $3 billion, which has fuelled international interest in African startups.

The data compiled by AVCA showed the financial sector accounted for 60% of the investments by value and nearly a third of deals by volume. There is no sign of letting up in 2022 as investors embrace tech businesses in Africa due to their huge potential, particularly fintech.

With the huge number of unbanked in Africa, and growing mobile internet penetration and a population expected to reach 1.5 billion people by 2025, Africa’s fintech market is expected to double its current volume of investment in the next two years.

Parents ask me all the time: what discipline would you recommend for my son/daughter who is a science student in a secondary school?  Disclosing my bias to electrical/electronics engineering, I have always recommended “electrical/electronics/computer engineering” or EECE. After that, I then recommend computer science.  Largely, I consider computer science a subset of EECE  and both are largely in phase.

In EECE, you have the chance to build microprocessors and broad electronic systems and then write the computer codes at the firmware/BIOS levels before any computer scientist can have a job. Without those machine-level or hardware-descriptive coding efforts, the field of computer science will not exist. So, everyone has to code with the addition that EECE professionals  must also design circuits and systems, and then write device drivers – the zenith of coding as you would be controlling electrical signals. If you believe that technologies run our world, you will agree that no industry can advance without those circuits and systems. Largely, EECE guys shape the future of markets through products they architect across industries.

Before Google, Facebook, Amazon, LinkedIn, etc can advance, Intel, Nvidia, Samsung, Analog Devices, etc must advance on electronics since all those codes depend on systems to power them. So, once those circuits guys have done their jobs, the next level comes: the computer science phase.

The top-layer world is now run by computer scientists. Yes, the software developers. With the firmware from the engineers up and running, getting the systems up, the computer scientists now build the operating systems and the applications on top of them. That translation is eating the world of commerce and industry. Simply, the world cannot have enough people doing that work. African software developers are having great moments. People need them and they’re paid very well.

The demand for African computer software developers reportedly skyrocketed in 2021 due to the global economic crisis, and of course, emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was revealed by a recent Google report.

In the Africa Developer Ecosystem report, data was gathered from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Algeria, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Morocco, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia.

In an interview with about 1,600 software developers across the continent, Google discovered that about 38% of African developers work for at least one company based outside the continent.

In short, good ones are hired by European companies weekly and relocated to Europe out of Lagos. Great companies like Andela have been built to export their talent globally. As I write, friends in Google are asking me to recommend a great one to lead an African research project (you need a research experience with PhD in a leading global university in machine learning).

So, parents, engineering is a great field; EECE offers the best opportunity for jobs. Yes, he is biased. I am because 100% of my classmates (more than 200 of them!) in FUTO are gainfully and fully employed by themselves or by others. If you miss that EECE, computer science is another call. Of course, both disciplines are the most competitive in many universities in Africa: in FUTO, EECE and CS are always oversubscribed by multiples.

Of course, this does not mean other fields like chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, medicine, etc are not great. They are superb but if you want a career insurance where with a decent skill you will not look for work, EECE and CS deliver those today in Africa. Remember, the deal is not the EECE or CS paper certificates but skills represented by those papers! Good luck.

Comment on LinkedIn Feed

Comment 1: Of course one need to consider the high paying career or high demand profession when choosing a career, but nevertheless they are only means to an end, not really an end in itself.

My Response: In life we look at statistics. We look at averages. That does not mean we do not have outliers. We have people that tore their PhDs and became monks. We have bankers who left and became teachers. But understand one thing: more than 85% of people become career-happier because they earn more money. That is why banks attract more engineers in Nigeria than our local engineering companies.

When the bank pays you N500k per month, that “grow to love your career” is activated over that engineering firm that pays “40k” and you are not sure it will arrive at the end of the month. But of course in the 15%, you can find people who are happy with the 40k but majority will prefer the N500k.

More so, as I have noted, as a young man, I chose HIGHER pay to help me finance my passion and interest at a higher level. As a mechanical engineering grad, if a bank offers you N500k/month, take it, over an engineering firm that offers N40k. You can use that N500k to finance your MSc and return back to mech engine later. Passion is not food, higher pay can activate latent passion for a job!

Comment 2: It appears parents are changing. When i was growing up and in sec. sch in the 1990s, most parents always wanted their kids who were doing science in sec. school to study Medicine or Pharmacy. Some people, who become medical doctors were forced to study medicine by their parents.. Prof, is EECE now higher that medicine?

My Response: “Prof, is EECE now higher that medicine?” – Medicine is peerless and cannot be compared to any profession. Doctors do miracles in hospitals. I am not doing comparison here. I am biased as I have disclosed.

Comment 3: From human development standpoint, telling children in secondary school to go for a particular course or parents choosing a career path for them is not a good idea. Nobody knows enough to predict the future of these children.

We keep pushing young people into certain career path because we assume is the ‘best’ thing for them going into the future. But the problem is, the future doesn’t follow a straight line. Many parents forced their children into accounting, Law Medicine etc many years ago. And many of them are very miserable now and confused because no one cared about their interests and abilities…

Children should be guided to make future career decisions not parents and ‘experts’ making future career choices for them… They should be guided on making career choices that solve real problems in their societies not based on our narrow view of future realities.

We already have many young EECE and Computer Science professionals moving into other career domains where they can find purpose and fulfillment. Yes… ‘money answereth all things’ but money isn’t everything.

My Response: “Many parents forced their children into accounting, Law Medicine etc many years ago. And many of them are very miserable now and confused” – not possible. Tell me a person who is miserable for studying medicine. Life is about statistics and averages: you stand a better career chance if you study medicine, EECE, CS, etc than Igbo language even if Igbo is your passion. Telling me that someone who studied medicine is miserable does not mean studying Hausa language would have helped.

This thing called Passion is overrated. Not a believer. I believe that you can unlock new passions in life. That means, you cannot experience a passion you do not know that exists.

The day a VC paid $$ for a day’s work opened another passion in me. That day, I decided for a passion to speak before the 1% I never knew that existed. You are in secondary school and magically you have a passion. Sure, you knew of 2% of possible “passions”. I believe in guiding people based on their capabilities and interests but I do not believe in allowing people to use just passion. Why? You may not know all passions out there.