Leadership Spotlight

"What's the next great market? What's the next untapped region?" asks Parker Snowe, associate director of international programs in Wharton's MBA program, who helps organize three annual student trips in Wharton's unique Global Immersion Program (GIP).

In May 2006, the GIP organized its first-ever trip to Africa, taking 28 MBA students on a three- week tour of South Africa, Ghana, and Senegal to learn about, and make contacts in, this developing region of the global economy.

The group spent 4 to 6 days in each country, meeting with local industry leaders, visiting major local businesses, and traveling through the region to experience its culture first-hand.

African Businesses Fight Poverty

The GIP's Africa trip was conceived and organized almost entirely by Wharton MBA students, led by Robert Befidi, Jr., WG'06, whose goal was "to increase the Wharton community's awareness and understanding of business issues faced by Africa." It included a mix of first-year and second-year MBA students, as well as coordinators for each country and two Penn graduate students from other divisions.

Snowe and the trip's student organizers chose to visit three distinct regions, to emphasize that Africa contains different markets with specific histories and economic needs:

• South Africa, the continent's largest and best- established economy, still struggling with its history of apartheid;
• Senegal, the former French colony, where, Snowe reports, "the Senegalese would rather do business with Americans;" and
• Ghana, the former British colony once known as the "Gold Coast."

In all these areas, entrepreneurial spirit battles corruption and poverty. In Dakkar, the capital of Senegal, the group came into town on the only paved road, passing booths at which people sold handmade crafts and other small products. In Ghana, a British entrepreneur successfully introduced an internet cafe (with computer training) for Ghanians who have no computers but still want Internet access.

This ability to create business opportunities extends from the macro-level—a company like Areeba that has introduced cellphone service across Ghana, for a population in which few people have phone service at home—to the micro-level of microfinancing loans to small businesspeople.

"Although the local business environment was thriving," says John Gadzi, WG'06, the country coordinator for Ghana, "there was still significant room for growth, which implies attractive opportunities for well-thought-out and executed business models." Or, as Snowe puts it, "There's money to be spent, and there's money to be made."

South Africa Creates Post-Apartheid Opportunities

In South Africa, businesses still struggle to redress the inequities of apartheid. As students learned from a panel of six senior financial services executives in Johannesburg, the country's Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) Program contains provisions for employment quotas, vendor management, and community development, including a mandate that 26% of shares at any public company be sold to a black enterprise.

All the South African businesses visited by the GIP team stressed their BEE-related programs. Diamond giant DeBeers began a Learn to Earn program that trains residents of black townships in such trades as carpentry and sewing. The Rand Merchant Bank (RMB) pioneered a reverse mentoring program to pair young blacks with white senior managers. RMB also sends newly hired employees to stay in black townships.

The GIP team visited the University of Cape Town Business School and the Gordon Institute of Business Science to learn about their efforts to train the country's next generation of black leaders. Equal hiring programs, they learned, can address only part of the legacy of apartheid, since South African blacks, historically denied access to education, may not yet have the skills and training to assume positions newly available to them.

Wharton MBA students taking the program for credit attended a four-part lecture series before they left, under the aegis of Penn's African Studies Center, designed to introduce them to Africa overall and to each country in their visit. These students will write papers in the upcoming semester that analyze key business aspects of the countries and companies they visited.

Each year, the GIP offers three trips to key business areas around the world, at which students meet industry leaders, tour companies, and learn about the region's cultural and economic opportunities. GIP trips in earlier years have taken students to Europe, India, Southeast Asia, Greater China, and South America.