Welcome to episode one , of this special segment where we discuss African Financial solutions for African problems.
Ohh yes!!
We had millenia old traditions and proud histories but one day in the 1880s suddenly London was effectively our capital.
The British imported a series of colonial officials who governed us with as little help from us as possible.
They imported a civil service, overrode our languages and much of our culture and enjoyed our resources.
They gave us a legal system dating back to some invasion of England in 1066 we had never heard of! The Germans, Portuguese, Belgians and French also did it.
Weirdly Africans are more divided now on whether they would rather speak French or English than they are united as Africans!
Then one day… the colonials simply left. They not only left, they left only a skeleton of what was needed to govern a country and run a financial system that would benefit everyone.
This happened across the continent. And much at once. Us born-frees were left to pick up the pieces.
The colonisers never expected that the “Winds of Change” would lead to a “Scramble From Africa”!
Our financial systems were largely as unprepared for what was to happen as our new governments were.
Africa, although rich in resources, had little experience of how to process them and not much money to build infrastructure.
If our cleverest politicians and academics couldn’t solve this, how was a freshly minted Ugandan, Congolese, Nigerian, etc, citizen meant to know how to look after and grow their money while becoming wealthier. Africans became poorer mostly.
African solutions to African problems are what Africans do best.
We’ll put the past behind us for a moment.
I want to teach you about how this is happening! We’ll touch on micro-finance, local remittances, community saving schemes, our wonderful mega-African gross settlement services and how consortiums are helping us leapfrog the digital divide.
In some ways we’re lucky because we get to build everything new and not have to fix what is broken and hope it will work.
In Uganda for instance, nobody really cared when cheques were disappearing because normal people never used them
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