Bridging cultural devide between China, African markets

WHEN I first got to Kenya, people were constantly telling me that the secret to doing well here was the kind of relationships you were able to establish.

This seemed very aligned with the concept of guanxi, which was familiar from my experiences of being an entrepreneur in China.

Even though this core concept was intrinsic and similar in both Kenyan and Chinese culture, for some reason, it didn’t feel like the concept was applicable in the same way across the two cultures.

But the more time I spend here, the more I feel that certain differences are not as immutable as people may think, and that there are many more parallels than expected.

When Daniel, the founder of Sokowatch, an e-commerce platform serving informal retail shops, first started learning Swahili, he also found some surprising similarities that helped him grasp the nuances of the language. For example, Mandarin doesn’t have articles such as “the” or “a”, but neither does Swahili.

While the company has flourished in Kenya and Tanzania, the actual idea first started in China. Back in 2015, the initial pilot was part of a trade trip for Wrigley’s to Southwest China. They were testing whether they could use Sokowatch’s technology to track chewing gum in similar meng dian, or small, roadside shops in Guangdong and Yunnan.

The pilot programme was not as viable in China, because China’s massive e-commerce infrastructure has organically fostered the growth of logistics companies. However, because the B2C e-commerce market has not flourished in the same way in Africa, Sokowatch was able to apply their mobile technology to B2B instead. The dukas, or informal shops, are to place orders at any time through SMS or mobile app, with free delivery of goods to their shop in less than two hours.

In fact, perhaps the biggest similarity between China and Africa is the one that stares you straight in the face – scale.

For example, one of the largest and successful social enterprise stories in Africa, Bridge International Academies, was actually seeded in China.

Shannon May, the founder of Bridge, was doing her post-doctoral work in rural China, where she first saw classrooms where the teachers didn’t show up.

When regulation made it impossible for Shannon to help solve this problem in China, she turned to Africa instead, where Bridge now runs 500 schools across the continent. The schools are designed for scale, replicating across the continent with smartphone-equipped school managers and tablet-equipped teachers that enable accountability and scripted learning.

Meredith Karazin, formerly the chief operating officer of Teach for China, who is now the head of growth and infrastructure at Moringa School, also believes that more importantly, it is the same “problem” that people working in edtech in China and Africa are trying to solve – is there a way to bring about better learning through education that has some sort of technological component?

For China and Africa, there are very similar dynamics at play: a large population of about 1.3 billion (although we’re talking about one country versus an entire continent); a demand for more practical education that moves beyond rote learning to comprehensively teaching all the skills, both soft and technical, that meet the needs of a changing society and workforce; and educational solutions that provide opportunities for all people, no matter where they live or how far away they are from good schools and great teachers.

Furthermore, the opportunities are also similar. The growth in access to mobile devices and connections has brought internet and technology, and thus access to information and online learning sources, straight into people’s hands.

While in China mobile penetration is already at 76 percent; sub-Saharan Africa’s mobile penetration continues to grow faster than any other region with unique mobile subscribers expected to reach 50 percent of the market to more than 500 million in 2020.

While family spending in education is also high in both Africa and China, the emphasis on formalised education and meritocracy is significantly more prominent in China than Africa. Access to technology and a high demand for education means a similar opportunity in China and Africa for edtech to bring more opportunities to learners.

Despite these similarities, we return to our original question, and there is a certain level of irony that the Chinese doing business in Africa have not fully internalised the importance of guanxi with their African counterparts.

Daniel suggests that perhaps it’s because China ultimately is a cultural bubble, and as such it has desensitised them to the importance of contextualisation.

The relevance of other people’s points of view has not been integrated into their social conscientiousness.

In fact, economic motivation does not necessarily expose cultural ignorance. Perhaps, we need to focus more on our similarities, rather than our differences, and be intentional in the way are creating a new China-Africa business culture, one that is neither wholly one nor the other, but a mix of both founded on empathy and common goals.