Sometimes you find the answer you have been looking for in places you never thought. Our challenge was to find a system that would make it easy and less risky for our viable business owners to explore the business opportunities of West Africa and, at the same time, improve our cultural interchange and discover our lost heritage.
Let's face it, we African Americans have been removed from our African roots for centuries and we are only touching the surface in the attempt to reconnect. Our approach to doing business in West Africa has been even less sophisticated. Too many of us go it alone and either become confused, swindled or just plain unsuccessful. It doesn't have to be like that if we get ourselves organized.
It took me by surprise when officials from the Canary Islands came to our office and introduced a program they were starting for all interested American entrepreneurs. For the last 30 years, they have been cultivating business relationships with all of the West African countries from Morocco to Equatorial Guinea.
I have come to find out that not only have the Canarians been able to do ongoing business with West African nations, they have established technical assistance offices throughout this part of the continent. They have done their homework and have established an infrastructure that gets you to the deal table fast and effectively. The cons and swindle games have been eliminated and they know where the real deals lie and the games to avoid. The Canary Islands Chamber of Commerce knows West Africa as well as anybody and now they are looking to African Americans to join them as partners. We have come to find this inviting and quite timely.
We Americans have developed a deep passion to find our West African roots. Ads on national television promote the use of swabbing your mouth and sending in the sample to be examined and determine where your DNA comes from such as Cameroon, Ghana, Senegal, etc. From there, we want to journey and find the people from which we come.
There is one big problem there. West Africa lacks hotel and travel facilities to meet the demand of 40 million American Blacks wanting to visit their homeland. The Canary Islands has developed an answer to that. Over the past 30 years, they have built more than 100,000 beautiful hotel rooms along their beaches. The Islands have a population of 2 million and are host to more than 12 million tourists per year, most of them Europeans.
The Islands are located 50 miles off the coast of Africa, just south of Casablanca. The scenario is this: you can enjoy the warm and beautiful environs of the Canary Islands and shuttle to and from Senegal, Ghana, Cameroon and other destinations. Members of the Canary Islands Chamber of Commerce have also built free-standing hotels in Senegal and other places along the coast to meet the growing demand of Americans wanting to visit Africa.
For too long, African businesses have been strapped with the dependence of shipping their goods all the way to Amsterdam, Brussels and England before they could be relayed to the United States. This is costly and time consuming. To answer this call for a change, the entrepreneurs of the Canary Islands have built two modern deep water ports open for business. They are ready to ship goods from there directly to ports such as Miami, Baltimore, New Orleans and Houston in the United States.
They have also developed trucking lines that go into the interior of West Africa and can supply or pick up goods deep into the bush at affordable rates. Americans who seek to import cold storage produce such as pineapples and bananas now have a process they can rely on. The dependable players have been identified and the process for setting up has been reduced immensely.
Flying to West Africa can take up much time and may force you to journey by way of London or Amsterdam. From the East Coast of the United States a direct flight to the Canary Islands is only six hours. When we get the travel demand up, we can have even more flights. Once in the Canary Islands we can set up in their beautiful hotels and shuttle to and from our West Africa destinations.
The entrepreneurs of the Canary Islands anticipate meeting African American entrepreneurs seeking joint ventures in West Africa. The National Black Chamber of Commerce is forming a strategic alliance with them and the mystery of doing business in Africa will be history.
The best is yet to come.
[Author Affiliation]
Harry C. Alford is Co-Founder, President/CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, Inc. Website: www.nationalbcc.org. Email: president@nationalbcc.org.
No comments:
Post a Comment