In 2008 well before there was an Andela, we found Africa but the Asians had found it first. An Indian company called Harvest-IT was the reason Swifta failed the first time in 2000, they took our only client because they could. They mastered the Internet before us and could scale.

2008 for us was the year of revenge and beating Asian companies in Africa at their game. I learned that having a multilingual African team working together closely as a team was what Indian/Chinese companies couldn't crack. It was what African multinational corporations needed.

We formed this team largely from Cameroon and took on Africa. We won every bid signal

1. Many of our team members were trained in India and understood what we were doing.

2. It was a new space with opportunity to learn new things and earn.

3. We paid better than Asian firms

I thought we were doing well until I visited India in 2011 for a Harvard Business School course on ”Managing Professional Services Firms” which was smartly tailored for the Indian market.

It was there that I met the ”Kings of Outsourcing.”

Companies doing hundreds of millions.

I saw their model early. The Middle East was expanding rapidly and needed tech resources. India was closer. They opened up offices in Dubai and Qatar but had campuses in Jaipur and Hyderabad with thousands of shared resources serving global markets. It was a very profitable model

What these Indian outsourcers did very well was form shared resource pools as they weren't as big as the Kings like Tata and TechMahindra. These were companies nobody had even heard about and one of them told me that they easily did a turnover of $200m annually. I couldn't get it

I had to travel to Jaipur to see for myself how organized they were. It was like an AWS of people. Any company could spin up the services they wanted from the pool of resources. I realized that the reason this was possible was training. They didn't do the training, the market did

There was a HUGE market for digital training in India because there was demand for digital resources globally and India had mastered the supply end of it. It was why it was easy for Harvest IT to kill us off in 2000. They didn't even need to pay regular salaries and had people.

India had mastered remote and temporary work models before the rest of the world clocked in. Many companies had their development teams in places like Bangalore. I came back to Africa with new respect and admiration and was determined to replicate it. I decided to visit Kenya.

Kenya in 2011/2012 was far ahead of the rest of East and West Africa and I wanted to learn what they were doing as we were already in Uganda beating the Asian companies. It was in Kenya that I learned that fear and Xenophobia was our real African limitation.

Whenever I heard that it is easier for ”white founders” to get funded in Africa, I was not very sympathetic because I tried to fund Kenyan companies but I was rebuffed. A decade later, things have gladly changed and we are now doing Kenyan deals. It took friendship to unlock it.

Bias and xenophobia isn't new to me anymore as I have met it all over Africa. The problem is that while we are wasting time to understand and unlock our previous biases, the world isn't waiting. Our strength in Africa as one massive block of people is being exploited as a market.

Instead of us becoming mass producers, we are net consumers. Andela tried to be everything from the training pool to the outsourcer. Many tried to replicate the model instead of collaborating. The biggest problem we have as Africans is not knowing when to collaborate or compete.

Autocorrect has muddled up some of the tweets and maybe I should write a proper blog post from this thread. It is an important lesson we should learn before moving forward.

Collaboration is not NICE to do, it is a MUST do. It is our only chance of survival.