Entrepreneurship in Africa: Part 4 in a Series
DOUALA, CAMEROON – Elvis Ndansi, CEO of a trading corporation and founder of his own health care foundation in Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital, says he comes from humble beginnings.
“I was born in a remote village in Cameroon of a single parent,” he says. “I was raised partly by my grandmother, who was a farmer, and my grandfather, who was a hunter.”
He says he’s always had an entrepreneurial drive. He nursed this spirit while in elementary school by selling guavas from a tray around the village on the weekends. He used the profit from selling the fruit from his family’s orchards as his pocket allowance for the week.
After performing well in secondary school, Ndansi’s mother asked him what he would like for a present. He told her he wanted a camera. With his new camera in hand, he started doing photography.
Girls began to pay him to take photos of them dressed up in their dormitories. He would photograph them, send the pictures for printing and then distribute them to the girls. Every week, he says he made about 4,000 francs CFA ($8.40 USD). He says he was soon considered one of the wealthiest students in his school.
In high school, Ndansi bought a second camera using the money that friends and loved ones gave him for doing well in his studies. This time, he says he recruited others to help him in photographing the students who wanted their pictures taken.
“And then I wasn’t the one doing the photography anymore,” he says.
Instead, his role was to take the film to a shop to print the photos and then collect the money for them.
Ndansi then studied health sciences at the University of Buea. His father offered him a computer during his first year. He says that rather than use the computer to play games, all he wanted to do was learn how to type quickly. After acquiring typing skills, he started earning money by typing his neighbors’ assignments and printing them elsewhere.
“From my activities there, I bought a printer so I could do my own printing and later bought a photocopy machine, too,” Ndansi says.
Ndansi got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nursing, in addition to receiving training in bioethics and leadership. He says he incorporates all these skills into the management of his current business and foundation.
The government hired Ndansi after he received his degrees to work as a senior health clinician in Bakassi, a peninsula in western Cameroon, but he says he preferred to do things on his own. So he created his own foundation, Unite for Health, and later on also started his company, Cameroon Trading Corporation Ltd.
As an entrepreneur, he imports medical equipment from other countries. He has now expanded to the distribution of pharmaceutical, medical and other biomedical products, with the distribution license of a U.S.-based company to market its products in Cameroon.
With his health foundation, he aims to provide basic health care to the underprivileged. One major project of the foundation is the creation of micro clinics, which consist of a laboratory, a consultation unit, a pharmacy and a hospitalization section, where patients can receive basic health care and treatment for simple illnesses.
His foundation also carries out community outreach programs, such as free educational programs for students on reproductive health to help reduce abortion rates in university communities.
Ndansi says that there are challenges to running his business and foundation. He says that getting the capital to start and run his business has been one of the main difficulties. He says he had to generate the funding himself since the banks would not give him a loan without collateral or property. Another challenge has been the fear of failure each time he wants to start a venture.
But he says he uses these challenges to serve as motivation. What keeps him going is his passion to serve others.
“With a medical background, each time I help to provide health care to someone in need, I feel very happy,” he says.
Entrepreneurs in Cameroon have built careers around creating businesses to provide what others need and welcome any challenges as added motivation for innovation. Business experts say the keys to success are sticking to a plan, being creative, remaining optimistic and doing one’s homework. The government has made starting a business faster and easier here, and international opportunities also exist for those interested in studying business abroad.
Unemployment is nearly 10 percent, and underemployment is nearly 70 percent in Cameroon, according to the National Institute of Statistics. But doing business has become easier here, according to the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation. Cameroon still ranks toward the bottom – 168th out of 183 economies – when it comes to the ease of doing business, but it jumped five spots overall between 2010 and 2011 and 34 spots in the ease of starting a business.
Like Ndansi, Emmanuel Doh is also an entrepreneur. Doh started a business called System Integration Services, which provides information technology, IT, services, training, sales and exams.
Although Doh has had success, he says there are challenges as well. He says that one major challenge is finding skilled employees. Sometimes he has to recruit outside the country, but he says the company is working toward being able to train more local people to fulfill these positions. Doh says that regulations set by the government also create challenges.
But, like Ndansi, he says that he uses these challenges as motivation.
“I can always move on or create opportunities within those challenges,” he says.
Doh says that developments in the IT sector, such as improving the communication infrastructure in order to increase access to bandwidth, could help his business grow.
“When I travel abroad, the bandwidth I pay in a place, say like America, is $50 USD, about 25,000 francs CFA,” he says. “I pay here in Cameroon for the same bandwidth about 3 million [francs CFA ($6,300 USD)].”
He says that there is a disparity in terms of access, and this creates a challenge for any company that wants to operate its business on the Internet to be able to pay for the bandwidth and still make a profit in the process.
Another entrepreneur, Jude Awambeng, is the owner of a travel and tourism consulting firm.
“In a nutshell,” he says, “we handle travel-related issues both for locals and foreigners.”
There are three divisions under his company: managing events, chartering planes and organizing tours.
Like the other entrepreneurs, Awambeng says he has had his share of hard times. But he says he has established strategies to curb them. One challenge is poor service from the companies his business works with.
“Some service providers in our sector do not have the capacity in personnel,” he says.
He says that most service providers that his company works with, such as hotels and restaurants, lack the standards that his clients require. He says the price they are forced to charge the client doesn’t match the value of the services received.
To limit the effect of such setbacks, Awambeng says he makes sure his own staff is well-trained.
“My staff and all my personnel are always trained twice a year and are evaluated on their performance,” he says.
He says that he does the best he can to make sure the service providers offer his clients the quality they are paying for.
“Sometimes I go right into the kitchen to make sure that the plate is coming out clean, the food is coming out warm, so that when the client eats it, they know they’re eating food under clean hygienic conditions,” he says.
He says that meeting clients’ expectations is important because word-of-mouth is his main marketing strategy to reach new clients.
“The No. 1 element for me is recommendation from previous clients,” he says. “The No. 2 element is my website.”
Awambeng says that friendliness is another key to success.
“Any person going out of the aircraft and coming into this country is coming with money,” he says. “And in hospitality, you have to smile for somebody to give you money. So we have to have that spirit.”
He says there also needs to be more accommodations for tourists, large conference rooms, space for exhibitions, affordable services at major hotels for the average tourist and good roads to the tourist sites in Cameroon.
Entrepreneurial experts provide various tips for aspiring entrepreneurs in Cameroon.
Juan Casimiro is an entrepreneur and educator from the Dominican Republic who grew up in New York City and now lives in Miami. He has conducted workshops, seminars and camps on business entrepreneurship in dozens of countries around the world. Last month, he held his first workshop in Cameroon.
With his master’s degree in education, Casimiro specializes in mentoring youth around the world on building individual and organizational strength from within. He has created or holds positions at various empowerment organizations for youths and adults and regularly gives lectures at embassies, universities and corporations around the world.
He says he started this business and his first business – exporting and importing goods to and from New York and the Dominican Republic – with no capital.
He says that for businesses at any level, the first step is creating a plan. He says putting something down on paper reminds people of their objective and goals.
“You must create some kind of plan in order to go into business,” he says.
He says entrepreneurs must continually develop this plan but make sure to always have one.
“At some point – even after you’ve started a business – come back, rearrange things, reflect,” he says. “But put your plan together.”
Secondly, he says that there are several skills today that every young entrepreneur must possess in order to succeed. These include being up-to-date with technology and learning at least two languages, especially English, which he says is the No. 1 spoken business language.
He says that creating a network of people who have different strengths but are like-minded in their interests in entrepreneurship development is also important. Being a business owner or entrepreneur can sometimes get lonely, particularly in the startup phase, he says.
“Don’t only create relationships,” he says. “Cultivate relationships and grow relationships. At the end of the day, you get what you want by helping others, and those individuals will help you.”
Finally, he cites seven basic mindsets that are critical to becoming the ultimate entrepreneur. They include: Everything is possible; Passion first; We are connected; 100 percent accountability; Attitude of gratitude; Live to give; and the Time is now.
He says challenges exist, but that people create many of these themselves.
“I think earlier on the challenges are those that you create,” he says. “A challenge or a problem that most of us say is a challenge are, I think, things that we focus on too much.”
He says one challenge for him was not thinking bigger sooner. He says other personal challenges included assuming he had to have a partner, which he says can be helpful but is not necessary, and having enough capital.
He says that all challenges and problems have solutions, and, in order to be successful, one has to be innovative and creative. He says that, regardless of the situation, successful entrepreneurs must remember that everything is possible.
“I had the bare necessities,” Casimiro says of starting his businesses. “But what I had that was bigger than capital was the will and desire to make it and to start the business venture. With that alone and my passion, I think I have been extremely successful in my life.”
He started his entrepreneurial days at age 10 while he was distributing newspapers to his community in Queens, N.Y. After delivering the paper, he asked the people if they would like anything else delivered, and he built his entrepreneurial career from there.
“I am teaching it, living it, and being an entrepreneur is the best thing I’ve ever done,” he says.
Dominique YAMB Ntimba, founder of a financial solutions company based in Douala, Cameroon’s largest city, also offers advice to aspiring entrepreneurs. He says that it’s important for entrepreneurs to do their professional homework regarding financial statements and marketing analyses.
In assessing a business plan, he emphasizes the practicality of the project and the readiness of the market to consume the product or service offered. He says that how much experience the promoter of the project has, how environmentally friendly the project is and whether it is able to stand a fast growth within the first two years are also salient factors.
The government has been striving to assist entrepreneurs in Cameroon in setting up and running their own businesses through the One-Stop Pilot Center and the Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Craft.
Gabriel Ennumedi, coordinator of the pilot center, says its aim is to speed up the creation of businesses by centralizing the services involved within one unit. He says that the center tries to unite in one place all administrative services for creating a business – including taxation, insurance, treasury and customer service – where people can find out what documents they need to prepare and fees they need to pay.
Ennumedi says that there are sometimes delays because of negative attitudes among some of the center’s personnel, holdups at the taxation office or equipment breakdown. But he says that overall, the center has eased the process of creating businesses in Cameroon, which now is supposed to take between three and five days.
Ebeneser Njanga is the director of corporation and promotion at the Douala Chamber of Commerce. He says that every business that is created in the country, legally registered and fulfilling tax obligations is automatically a member of the chamber. The structure organizes trainings, trade shows and international partnerships between Cameroonian enterprises and their counterparts abroad.
Njanga says that the chamber doesn’t provide funding to entrepreneurs but can instruct them about how and where to get it. In addition to a documentation center with publications on business, the chamber also has a section that coordinates opportunities for selling Cameroonian goods in the U.S. market through the African Growth and Opportunity Act.
Mignon Turner, cultural affairs officer at the U.S. Embassy in Yaoundé, says there are other international opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs here as well. She says that there are several exchange programs within the embassy that are sponsored by the U.S. government, with the largest being the Fulbright Program. She says the Community College Initiative also offers full scholarships to Cameroonians without bachelor’s degrees to study trades such as business in the United States.
