The Entrepreneur - Cameroon's Premier Economic & Business Journal

African Science to be tapped for Business

The UN Economic commission for Africa (UNECA) has announced a new fund to turn scientific ideas into successful enterprises. The African Science, Technology and Innovation Endowment Fund (ASTIEF), along with the African Science to Business Challenge, was launched at the Second Science with Africa Conference held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The fund’s objective is to motivate inventors and innovators and spur on the development of sustainable industries and enterprises for the continent, according to Opoku-Mensah, director of UNECA’s ICT, Science and Technology Division. “The fund will help translate scientific research and ideas into micro-entrepreneurship to spur socio-economic growth on the continent,” Opuku-Mensah reported. She observes that while African research leads to many ideas being formulated, the means to translate them into enterprise is lacking. She believes that Africa also needs goods and services derived from applied science, and ASTIEF will fund and support both enterprising individuals and research and development centres. The Uneca-managed fund received $500,000 from various African organizations, mainly in the private sector, Opuku-Mensah said. Oye Ibidapo-Obe, who serves as president of the Nigerian Academy of sciences, describes the fund as the first in Africa to directly support science innovation//African Business

Exploiting Africa’s Intra-Regional Potential for Development

Challenges and Opportunities for Enhancing Trade in The CEMAC Sub-Region

By Affuembey Enow Affuembey

Trade is primordial for economic development. A successful use of trade can boost a country's development. Countries that develop invariably increase their integration with the global economy, while export-led growth has been a key part of many countries’ successful development strategies, especially in Asia. However, it is challenging and thorny for low income countries to access the markets of older high income countries in the northern hemisphere. Deliberately imposed barriers to trade with exorbitant tariffs, quotas, and tariff escalation; and domestic and external producer support, primarily in the form of subsidies and export credits combine to impose bizantine resistance for countries in Africa to access lucrative markets. Nonetheless, looking inward and exploiting local potentials provide unexploited vista for domestic growth, empowerment and development. No region is richly endowed as the Central African subregion to exploit its inherent potential.

 

Emotions of Work: Passion Versus Greed

"I am a college educated blue collar worker that owns his own welding business. I could have had an office job but I chose to follow my passion and my dreams. I have been doing it for 37 years and I have never done anything else. I started at the bottom sweeping floors. Some days I wish I never got into it, but most days there is nothing else I'd rather be doing. The hard work is what makes it great. I get my job satisfaction out of my work, I can create and do things that most people can't. My work will be around and seen long after I'm gone. I consider my work to be more of an art, something no text book can teach. My knowledge will live on in those I teach, and what I didn't teach is coming with me when I drop . I do it mostly for the love of it, for me it has always been a lifestyle. When you do something for living you should do it because you are passionate about it and not for the money, if you are passionate about your work and good at it money usually follows. People have to follow their passion more, and not be driven by greed. People need to stop being brainwashed about what they "should" do for a living and do what is right for them: blue collar or white collar"...anonymous

Europe Graduates from Torture?

European Torture of Africans: An Application of Theory

By Emmanuel Konde

The  revelations by 83-years-old Gen. Paul Aussaresses [of French atrocities in Algeria] cannot be shocking to any Frenchman, let alone the political leadership.  Almost everywhere the Europeans conquered and subjugated and colonized non-Europeans, torture of the worst kind was employed to crush the last vestiges of resistance.  Thus, the use of torture is not exclusively a French "thing"; it is of European culture.  African forebears, some dead and some living, were subjected to European methods of torture.   If today Europeans should pretend a higher sense of morality and respect for "human rights,"  it is only because they have achieved complete supremacy and the tools of torture seem no longer relevant to their cause.

Fund-raising Jamboree of Ex-Students of Sacred Heart College Mankon bags modest Millions

Countdown to the 2011 Golden Jubilee of Sacred Heart College Mankon: SHESA Yaoundé pilots the fundraising with 7,702,750 FCFA

By Akere-Maimo

As a prelude to the Golden Jubilee ceremony of Sacred Heart College Mankon to take place in January 2011 on campus, the Yaoundé chapter of the Sacred Heart Ex-students Association (SHESA) raised 7,702,750 FCFA for this purpose. The fundraising night that held on Friday, 13 August 2010 at the Yaoundé Conference Centre, was highly attended by the members of SHESA Yaounde, their friends and loved ones. The event came as a prelude to a series of activities geared towards mobilising resources from the different SHESA regional branches and in the Diaspora.  The fundraising is aimed at launching the construction of a multi-purpose auditorium of about 2000 sitting capacity back in their alma mater, Sacred Heart College (SAHECO) Mankon. 10,830,000 FCFA was the total amount raised with expenses swelling up to some 2,177,250 FCFA. The total cash obtained stood at 9,930,000 FCFA and pledges making for 900,000 FCFA.

South-South cooperation offers new opportunities for transforming African economies, report says

Growing trade, finance, and investment with other developing countries is opportunity to diversify production, acquire technology, and develop regional markets, study notes

Africa should take steps to ensure that its growing economic interactions with large developing countries, including China, India, and Brazil, result in economic diversification rather than simply the sale of African commodities and raw materials -- the traditional pattern of the continent´s relations with the industrialized North, an UNCTAD report recommends. New, increasingly important economic partners in the "South" can help this African transformation along not only through growing trade and financial flows but by supporting regional infrastructure projects and transferring knowledge and technology, notes the Economic Development in Africa Report 2010 (EDAR ´10).

Amo Afer et Kant: Preuves d'affinités suspectes

Est-il sagace et judicieux de s´emporter et de s´indigner de ce qu´une intellectuel ait relevé le manque de probité intellectuelle de la part d´un autre docte – fût-il une icône -- qui prêchait pourtant une moralité rigoriste ? Le philosophe Simon Mougnol, en mettant en exergue les similitudes très suspectes entre une partie de la pensée de Kant et celle d´Amo Afer, n´a fait qu´éveiller les consciences des internautes et des lectrices. Il a aussi voulu attirer l´attention sur un fléau qui consiste à effacer systématiquement, de l´Histoire universelle, toute marque mémorable  d´une partie de l´humanité, pour promouvoir médiatiquement les personnalités d´autres contrées de notre globe terrestre. Le fait de gommer avec zèle les traces exceptionnelles des humains de couleur de la mémoire collective universelle, renforce plutôt les préjugés défavorables et vains contre d´autres races, dont les Africains...Download

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Trading in African Stock Markets: African Markets in 2010 - Full of Potential.

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Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry

Geoffrey Jones, Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010. xiv + 412 pp. $45 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-19-955649-6.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson, Centre for Business History, Stockholm.

In the introduction to his new book, Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry, Geoffrey Jones makes two points that instantly trigger the reader’s interest. The beauty industry is said to be one of America´s most profitable industries with a yearly global turnover of around $330 billion. And yet, according to Jones, it is remarkable that so little has been written about the extraordinary work and people who made beauty a business....Jones approaches his subject through three lenses. The first one covers the story of the entrepreneurs who built the business. Going back to ancient medical knowledge, religious devotion and the human desire to use artificial means to enhance attractiveness, Jones explains how the key players, often cosmopolitans, translated such desires into brands, products and ultimately global enterprises. The story of famous perfumers from France (Coty) as well as the success of the female makeup entrepreneurs in the U.S. (Rubinstein, Arden) is carefully examined and full of surprising anecdotes. The general problem was often one of establishing the legitimacy of the industry and overcoming the ethical objections to the use of the products. Building on associations with fashion, media and celebrity was essential, both for luxury brands and later also for mass market products. At the same time cleanliness and hygiene became symbols of Western modernity, making soap and toothpaste must-haves for everyone. Innovations in recipes and packaging -- and a constant interpretation of new trends in social behavior and lifestyle -- skillfully communicated changing beauty ideals and the need for consumers to follow them....More

Javier Clemente Heads Cameroon's National Football Team Coaching Staff

Javier Clemente, Omam Biyick, Jacques Songo’o; the trio in command

By Pamela Bidjocka

It was being rumoured, the rumour and speculation was confirmed through a communiqué signed on Tuesday 17th of August 2010. Javier Clemente, Omam Biyick and Jacques Songo’o all make up the team to coach the Indomitable Lions in the next two years. Before the communiqué was made public, some fans whispered that an agreement between Javier Clemente and the President of the Cameroon Football Federation, Iya Mohamed had been signed in Biarritz, France. The Spanish coach who has been a player and former coach of the Spanish national team will receive his baptism of fire in just about three weeks as Cameroon faces the Mauritius Island in matches counting for the eliminatory of the African Cup of Nations.