Experts who spoke recently at Oxford University’s Conference have challenged employers to invest in training employees for sustainable growth of an Organisation.
Chukwuka Monye, Founding Partner, Ciuci Consulting and Director General, Delta Economic Summit Group, said this while making presentation on capacity building at the conference.
Tara Fela-Durotoye, the CEO/Founder, House of Tara International joined Monye and other African business influencers at the Oxford Business Africa Forum, hosted by Oxford University’s Said Business School recently to discuss spurring sustainable economic development across the continent.
Tara spoke about mentoring as a critical component in empowering youth as typified in House of Tara’s sale representative model.
The conference brought together a number of business heavyweights, Africans in the Diaspora and students from across the United Kingdom. The aptly themed “Unreasonable Africa” forum discussed the sort of out-of-the-box thinking that is required to successfully conduct business on the continent with real life examples from a panel of experienced speakers. Key opportunities and challenges in agribusiness, energy, health, infrastructure, security, trade facilitation, ICT, finance and other sectors were discussed in detail.
Both business leaders who started their companies while young encouraged the youthful audience to be tenacious about being excellent at whatever they choose to do.
The forum was able to effectively engage participants on the issues of enabling, navigating and scaling businesses in Africa towards sustainable growth and development.
Other representatives from Nigeria were Wale Olokodana, enterprise Services Director, Microsoft Nigeria, Ladi Delano, founder, Grace Lakes Partners and Akinwole Omoboriowo, II Chairman/CEO, Genesis Electricity.
The Keynote speakers, Trevor Manuel, senior Advisor, Rothschild Group and former South African Cabinet Minister) and Dolika Banda (Independent Consultant and Former Acting managing director and Regional Director, CDC Group, stressed the importance of integrity and the need to incentivize African intellectuals in diaspora to come back home to help the continent.
“Although some of us will go back to Africa and physically put back together the pieces, we must understand that some of us do not have to be in Africa to help Africa”, Dolika Banda said.
