When Emma Fry wanted to go on a vegan friendly holiday in Europe, she couldn’t find a company to help. It simply didn’t exist. So she decided to launch one (after riding her motorbike around Guatemala, drinking lots of coffee and overdosing on avocados).
Now, the 31 year-old (known to friends as ‘the vegan biker’) from Dorset, runs Veganbnb Travel and divides her time between Guatemala, Spain and the UK, where she runs foodie adventures for vegans, vegetarians – and just about anyone who’s interested in being happier and healthier.   Emma Fry Interviewed

The US-Africa Business Forum brings together business executives and heads of state.  The event — part of the three-day U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit and co-sponsored by the Department of Commerce and Bloomberg Philanthropies — is the first such gathering.

There is reason to be optimistic that Africa may be at a turning point, given that seven of the 10 fastest-growing economies in the world are on the continent.  “This is not charity; this is self-interest” is how President Barack Obama described the new approach. In other words, growth in Africa can generate growth in the U.S.

The candor is refreshing. As the participants assemble, though, they should be mindful of the history of self-interested business dealings in Africa. While that history may be lost to Americans, Africans have a longer memory, and some sensitivity to past relationships may pay significant dividends for American business leaders operating now.

America has long traded with Africa. That’s the good news. The bad news is that for almost two centuries, the commercial connection was largely defined by the slave trade and the commerce it directly and indirectly generated, such as the shipment of sugar and the distillation of rum. Many merchants in New England built vast fortunes by shipping slaves to the New World until the cessation of the trade in 1808, accumulating enough capital to jump-start the U.S.’s industrial revolution.

After the end of the international slave trade, the era of “legitimate” exchanges with Africa commenced, as U.S. merchants, taking advantage of conflicts between European powers, managed to trade with west African countries, exchanging rum, tobacco, brandy and, eventually, manufactured goods in exchange for ivory, dyewood, gold dust and other natural resources.

The U.S.’s efforts to open markets in Africa were stymied in the second half of the 19th century. The problem lay with the European’s imperial conquest of the continent, which culminated in the Berlin conference of 1884-1885, when Europe’s powers effectively divided up the region, inaugurating a brutal period of exploitation that found fictional expression in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”

Although the U.S. may have wanted a piece of the action and did what it could to profit from the mad scramble for African resources, it found itself shut out of trade with most of the new colonies, thanks to imperial trade protections. The Americans protested, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce insisting in 1884 that places such as the Belgian Congo should remain “free from the interference or political control of any one nation.” But such entreaties generally fell on deaf ears, and American commerce in Africa dwindled.

By the early 20th century, the U.S. had managed to get a foothold in places such as South Africa, but in general, its trade paled compared with that of Britain. Moreover, it was lopsided. Americans, in other words, didn’t actually buy a whole lot from Africa. The continent was instead viewed simply as a dumping ground for U.S. products. In 1901, for instance, goods from Africa constituted a mere 1.2 percent of total U.S. imports. That figure barely budged in the succeeding years.

And actual direct investment in Africa was negligible, with the exception of Firestone’s investment in rubber plants in Liberia before the outbreak of World War II. Africa, when it appeared on the radar of U.S. businessmen, was a place to sell, not a place to make long-term investments. That job fell to imperial powers such as Britain, which had little interest in, say, setting up a competing manufacturing power in a colony.

The outbreak of World War II triggered a temporary spike in imports from Africa but little direct investment, a problem that would continue to loom large in the postwar era. South Africa’s finance minister complained in 1949 that “while American business has always been keenly interested in South Africa as a market, it has with a few notable exceptions neglected South Africa as a field of investment.”

Elswhere, the situation was worse. Investors steered clear of African nations for fear of losing assets to civil wars, nationalization campaigns and other perils that dominated the headlines in the 1950s and 1960s. (It didn’t help matters that the U.S. and the Soviet Union fought a series of proxy wars on the continent, further undermining investor confidence.)

In 1969, the book value of American direct investments in Africa was a paltry $2 billion. This was a drop in the bucket: The total book value of U.S. foreign direct investment at the time was $65 billion.

Trade imbalances remained a vexing problem throughout the postwar era. In 1979, Leopold Sedar Senghor, president of Senegal, called upon the Organization of Africa Unity to deal with the “scourges” afflicting Africa, in which “trade imbalances” ranked on par with apartheid, racial discrimination and “mercenarism.”

Business leaders now turning their eyes to Africa need to be mindful of precedent, particularly the tendency to view Africa only in terms of exploitation, not investment. Appeals to self-interest are appropriate in discussing business opportunities, but the attendees at this week’s conference should ensure that both sides’ “self-interest” gets equal representation going forward.

Following the 2007–09 financial crisis, bank lending to businesses plummeted. Five years later, the dollar amount of bank commercial and industrial lending has finally surpassed the previous peak. However, despite very accommodative monetary policy and abundant excess reserves in the banking system, the spread of the commercial loan interest rates over the target federal funds rate remains above its long-run average. This suggests that business loans are not yet cheap relative to banks’ funding cost.  Simon Kwan of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

Teresa Domenech writes:  A circular economy is one that exchanges the typical cycle of make, use and dispose in favour of as much re-use and recycling as possible. The longer materials and resources are in use, the more value is extracted from them. This could contribute toward reducing Europe’s dependence on critical materials such as cobalt, fluorspar or gallium, but also reduce overall demand by recovering the resources, nutrients or energy contained in products at the end of their useful life.

Extending the life of products and materials prevents the over-generation of waste and recovers the full value of products. This would create new business opportunities and revenue streams, while minimising the environmental impact of mining, resource extraction, refining and manufacture.  The Circular Economy

SIlicon Valley Bank’s report indicates US problems. Innovation Economy Outlook survey is out, and this year, SVB decided to focus on one topic in particular, in addition to conducting its general survey. “We asked,” reads the group’s report, “1,200 tech executives in innovation hubs around the world about the representation of women in leadership positions at their companies.”

SVB’s findings are in accord with most estimates: Less than 50% of technology companies have women in the C-suite or serving on the board of directors.

Only one region in the US broke 50%, the southeast. The national percentage of tech companies with women in leadership roles is 45%.  Europe is at 50%, Asia is at 56%, and “other innovation centers” reached 58%.

These percentages may well be splitting hairs, though. Companies were only asked if they had any women in the C-suite or serving on the board, and so whether a company had only one woman who served on the board, or was a start-up had 90% female employees, the two scenarios (and anything in between) counted the same way. If 50% of companies in Europe have women in power, it doesn’t necessarily mean that those companies are more empowering or more diversity friendly than companies in the US.

What European companies do have going for them, though, said SVB Chief Information Officer Beth Devin, is generally greater acceptance of parents needing flexible schedules in order to meet family responsibilities. Men and women are both granted this understanding, and adopting a similar attitude here could affect US companies where women are hired straight out of college into entry-level positions, but then cannot rise within the company past a certain point if they choose to become mothers and primary caregivers for their children.

Putting aside our technological behemoths, the US has problematic industries. As SVB’s survey demonstrates, within the greater context of technology companies, not all specializations hire women equally. Healthcare, it should come as no surprise, lead the pack with 56% of related companies having at least one woman in an executive or board-level position. Of course, healthcare has had strong female representation for as long as people have had midwives. Following healthcare’s statistic were software-related companies at 44%, hardware at 36%, and cleantech at 35%.

A breakdown also occurs when companies are parsed by size. “Larger companies are more likely to have women at the helm,” reads the survey, which goes on to show that regardless of whether the perspective is global, or focused on the US, the UK, or other innovation centers generally, when start-ups are in the pre-revenue stage, they tend to put fewer women into executive positions. Larger companies with revenues promote more women, but globally, the percentage that do so is still only 49%, and in the US, it’s 44%.

Breaking down these statistics further, it seems that most companies are basically all or nothing when it comes to promoting women. Though 26% of survey respondents reported having women on the board of directors, and 37% have women in the C-suite, the number of companies with neither is made particularly clear when the total percentage of companies with one or the other falls so short at 46%. This means that almost 20 percentage points are accounted for by overlap – companies that have women in both kinds of executive positions – and 54% don’t have women in either kind of executive position. Over 70% of respondents are likely on the more extreme ends of the spectrum.