Away from Africa

Thanks to the professional social networking platform, LinkedIn, I connected with Joël Roux, General Director of CFAO Technology Cameroon. Later, during a stay in Douala, I had the pleasure of meeting him in person. Many of us wonder about the information technology and especially web access capacity of Sub-Saharan Africa. A while back, I wrote about IBM in Africa but was still searching for more in-depth information. Mr. Roux kindly accepted my request for an interview. Of course, he, also, is bound by his organization's confidentiality clauses, but he offered some additional insight. Joël Roux in his Douala office First of all, what is CFAO and its history? Formerly known as SCOA, the company was founded in 1881 in St. Louis, Senegal. It used to be a trading company  between Africa and France. It was renamed CFAO in 1887. In the meantime the company grew to be a multinational conglomerate represented in 34 African countries, 7 French overseas territories, Vietnam and ...

As I currently work in information technology, I came across an article about IBM's activities in Angola. This made me curious to find out more about IBM's activities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Not being on the ground, it was not easy to receive information. IBM's Growth Markets headquarters are based in Shanghai, China--a half-day of time zones away from New York, and where the staff appears to be incredibly busy and constantly globe-trotting. I reached out to Bruno Di Leo, General Manager, IBM Growth Markets, who put me in contact with Ms. Vera Rosauer. She provided me with the answers to my questions (listed below).  I would have liked to have more details, and something akin to personal stories, however, IBM is an enormous organization, and corporate communications are tightly controlled--understandable, viewing the fact that information is often twisted in the media, but the result is that this blog post ends up sounding rather commercial, but it is absolutely not a spo...