McKinsey has broken digital strategies retail banks, in Africa, can take as 40% of African banking customers now prefer digital channels while about the same like branches. The consulting giant in the report offers four distinct digital strategies: digitally transform like Equity Bank (Kenya), partner with telcos like MShwari, become a digital bank like ALAT, and build an ecosystem of non-banking services like Alipay.

. Some 40 percent of the African banking customers we surveyed prefer to use digital channels for transactions, roughly the same share as those who prefer branches. In four of the continent’s major banking markets, the share of customers who prefer digital channels is significantly higher than the share preferring the branch channel. Banks can adopt one of four distinct digital strategies:

1. The first is to digitally transform their existing operations, to increase their share of digital sales and transactions to beyond 60 to 70 percent on each measure, as Kenya-based Equity Bank has done.
2. Second, banks can partner with telcos or fintechs to deliver mobile financial services to their clients at a cost below that of the branch network. An example, also from Kenya, is MShwari, the mobile-based loans application formed in partnership between Commercial Bank of Africa and Safaricom.
3. The third digital strategy is to build a digital bank from scratch— as Nigeria’s Wema Bank did in launching ALAT,Africa’s first fully digital bank, in 2017.
4. Finally, banks can build an ecosystem or platform of non-banking services. Alipay in China and the Commercial Bank of Australia have applied this approach at scale in areas such as travel and hospitality (Alipay) and home-buying (CBA).

By Nnamdi Odumody

According to the Food and Agricultural Organization, 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted every year. The 1 billion hungry people in the world could be fed on less than a quarter of the food wasted in the United States of America and Europe. Simply, food waste is a major problem in the world, creating disequilibrium where some regions waste food even as others go hungry.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, 35-50 percent post harvest losses for perishable agricultural products are lost annually in the region due to poor planting practices.

In a recent report released by the World Economic Forum, cutting food waste by 20 million tonnes could help the transformation of global food systems by 2030.

South Korea recycles 95 percent of its food waste. Its citizens generate more than 130 kg of food waste every year. In 2005, dumping of food in landfills was banned, and in 2013, compulsory recycling of food waste was introduced, using special biodegradable bags. An average family of four pays $6 a month for the bags which encourages home composting.

The bag charges meet 60 percent cost of running the scheme, and increased the amount of food waste recycled from 2 percent in 1995 to 95 percent presently. The South Korean government approved the use of recycled food waste as fertilizer although some wastes are also deployed as animal feed.

In Seoul, its capital city, 6,000 automated bins equipped with scales and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) weigh food waste as it is being deposited in real time, and charges residents using an ID card. This had led to the reduction of food waste in the city by 47,000 tonnes, in six years, according to city officials. Before depositing waste, its residents remove moisture to reduce the weight which helps in reducing their charges as food waste is 80 percent moisture, saving the city $8.4 million in collection charges within the period.

The waste collected using the biodegradable bag scheme is squeezed at the processing plant to remove moisture which is used to create biogas and bio oil. The dry waste in then turned to fertilizer for its urban farm industry which has increased in the past seven years, covering 170 hectares of community space in Seoul with the local administration providing between 80-100 percent of  startup costs.

Urban farming has helped to unite residents who are isolated from one another, and the city’s leadership plans to install waste composters to support this growing trend.

Nigeria and the rest of Africa can learn useful lessons from the South Koreans, in the sustainable management of waste, to create a circular economy that will make our environment livable for the 21^st century.

The Jumia IPO was really good, not just for Jumia, but for many others. I spoke with many media organizations, and added some clients in the process. A radio station invited me to Philadelphia but I had to decline because of scheduling conflicts. It turns out that my 30 million addressable market size is it.  A VC fund asked us to rework numbers from its African portfolios Can we have more IPOs?

The Precious 30 Million Nigerians

Here is an excerpt from one of my interviews to a U.S. publisher.

“You can’t scale as quickly as Alibaba did in China or Amazon did in the States,” said Ndubuisi Ekekwe, founder and chairman of Fasmicro,. ..

“In Nigeria, companies like Jumia only have about 30 million potential customers, we estimate, with the necessary disposable incomes for travel, out of about 190 million residents,” said Ekekwe. “Social mobility is too static. Africa’s strongest economies typically don’t have the broad and growing middle classes you need to repeat the success of a Ctrip.”

Jumia has a date with destiny as it works for its first quarterly for the NYSE. If it shows growth, Jumia can hit north of $4 billion but if it misses key indicators like revenue and active users, Jumia will be under severe stress. It has already given up more than $1.2 billion from its top numbers (now worth $2.7 billion from $3.9 billion). It has to make sure that stops, as American investors are panic-prone when it comes to foreign companies.

We need more IPOs as it makes people pay attention on the promises. Interswitch and Andela should get ready. This is good business as the world pays attention on Africa and Nigeria! Tekedia coverage of the IPO is here.