News and Business

Lessons on Doing Business in Africa from Women

Starting a business in any market, let alone a frontier market, comes with many inherent risks and challenges.  However, all successful businesses have had to overcome adversity at one point or another.  Loide Monteiro and Funke Opeke are two women who are fully aware of such adversities and today they each own and operate successful businesses in Africa.

Loide Monteiro is CEO of Loide Engineering. The firm provides design, development, and planning services for municipalities in Cape Verde. It works in a range of sectors from energy to gold mining to solid waste treatment, and has recently expanded into Angola.

Monteiro indicates part of her success is not only her design expertise and ability to complete tasks efficiently, but also she is able to find the right partners to help implement the infrastructure. These partnerships include those with skilled ICT companies and commercial partners who open up the market for Monteiro. She also adds that it is important to offer a service for which developing countries have a need.

Funke Opeke is CEO of MainOne, the developer of one of the large submarine cable projects on the continent and a leading wholesaler and business-to-business telecommunications provider across West Africa.  She founded MainOne four years ago to, “address low Internet penetration and high cost of international communications within the region.”  To remedy these issues, Opeke and her partners have built a submarine cable that runs from Europe to West Africa. The introduction of the cable has increased bandwidth to people in West Africa and has also reduced the cost of international communication.  Opeke reports that, “The cable has been in operation since July of last year (2010) and we are the largest Internet service provider in West Africa today.”

As major operations require the help of others, Opeke stresses the importance of forming solid business partnerships when exploring integration into other regions.  “We started operations in two English- speaking countries, Nigeria and Ghana, and now we’re starting to expand and delivering services into (French-speaking) countries starting with Togo.  We’ve had to do that by understanding their regulations, market structures, and geography, (as well as) build the necessary relationships to deliver services into those markets.  Building relationships and partnerships to open that up has been really critical to our success in West Africa.”

When it comes to advice for other women entrepreneurs Opeke offers, “Developing a competency in what you want to do is really critical to success.  For women to command the respect and attention they need (and) to get into a position where they’re actually doing business, they need to bring that high level of competency to the table.”  Monteiro adds that, “You also need to have determination and not give up.  Many times you find people who try to put you down and not let you to move forward, so you have to be determined, and know what you want, and go after it.”

Featured image is Loide Monteiro, CEO of Loide Engineering. Image provided by Initiative for Global Development (IGD).

written by Lauri Elliot

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