Wednesday 21st December 2005
Our man in Africa
London Business School Associate Professor John Mullins recently spent time in Kenya, developing and delivering case study workshops for the United States International University (USIU) in Nairobi.Working alongside Columbia Business School Professor Murray Low, professor Mullins worked with local businesses in Nairobi, to develop eight case studies for the MBA course at USIU. Mobile telecoms provider Safaricom was the subject of one case. An early forecast of market potential had estimated that 500,000 handsets would be sold in Kenya. To date, Safaricom has sold more than three million. Unaccounted disposable income, the lack of any traditional landline communications network and the sensible decision to market the product at the mass market on a pay-as-you go basis, with per-second billing, has accounted for the success.
Professor Mullins noted that the surprising results were a reminder of both the challenges and opportunities encountered in the African business world. Tales of the ‘human telephone booth', where those with handsets set up booths on the street and sell talk time to the public, show the level of entrepreneurship waiting to be harnessed. ‘Getting involved with the business schools there,’ says Professor Mullins, ‘is as much about learning new ways to look at our old theories, as it is imparting know-how.’
On other visits, Professor Mullins spent time training up-and-coming venture capitalists for the African Venture Capital Association and speaking at the 2005 AVCA conference, on what savvy investors look for when they invest in new companies.
Professor Mullins’ affinity with Africa is borne from an unlikely source. His daughter Heather spent the summer of 2002 in a Kenyan village and returned home determined to raise funds to provide an education for children of the ‘lost generation', who had lost their parents to AIDS. She has since raised enough money, through local fundraising, to provide a secondary school education for more than 30 children from the village. Following the success of this initial involvement, the Mullins family is now looking at ways to raise funds for the higher education of these children.
For more information on the business cases, or any other of the African initiatives, please contact Professor Mullins at jmullins@london.edu.
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