Crowd Funding The Future Of African Progress

#CrowdFundingAfrica

Let all Africans make crowd funding the buzzword of this century because it was the source of our ancient civilization. It’s an integral part of our communal based traditional systems and culture which saw our greatest contributions to humanity.

Collaboration, Cooperation and Unity

The secret is to spend less on individual consumption, link up with like minded people; pool resources, knowledge and skill with each other. Then fund ideas, ventures and projects that produce collective output for the growth of the collective.

Capital Comes From Numbers

The excuse of lack of capital is not only old but lame. The imported luxury cars, ostentatious homes and costly electronics we spend $460bil yearly importing into Africa are testament to that.

And because we continue with this lame excuse of lack, Africans have become synonymous with consumption, handouts and not collaborating or building. Even the illustration below has no black faces because black people tend not to be associated with partnership or collaboration but destitution and servitude.

Lack Of Collectivization

This is due to the fact that we don’t appreciate how uniting together, organizing ourselves and collecting small cents overtime can accumulate substantial capital to leverage real opportunity and resources to create wealth.

As a result we are always begging for foreign investment from other races because as a people we don’t realize that the cents in our pockets when combine with those of our peers form investment.

Banks Are Crowd Funds

Banks, stock markets, insurance, national tax, companies and cooperative banks are all different models of crowd funds, albeit with much bureaucracy. They all begin with individuals collecting together and contributing their small portions of money and skill which then build into a huge endowment.

Rhodesia & Most Colonies Were Crowd Funds

Cecil John Rhodes funded the colonization of Southern Africa with collective investment and loans from European capital "crowd funds". They chose to call these chartered and listed companies. So why have we not learnt to do the same yet our African civilization was built on communal collaboration?

We built the Great Zimbabwe, Mapungubwe and Khami as collaborating communities using mushandirapamwe. The pyramids exist because of the same principle.

So why are we as Africans not combining to approach African Americans and the African diaspora to invest in African opportunity and resources to build the next generation empire and pyramids?

Zimbabwe Was Built By Crowd Funds

Modern day Zimbabwe itself was built by cooperatives and community based initiatives like Food For Work Program. These built most of our rural schools, clinics, roads and bridges with the stewardship of government’s DDF. How come we have lost that culture that saw us build the best education infrastructure on the continent?

Invest More Than Consumption

Let’s rekindle the era in which Africa build world leading structures and civilizations by building a few less houses, buying less cars and investing less in idol consumption. Let us create organizations, establish governance structures, pool our money with like minded people of our kind to fund innovative ideas and solutions to African problems.

Invest Into Africa’s Century

We have to learn to fund our own ideas and solve our own problems because no one is coming to give us capital to develop our own. Unless we want the Chinese to bring their cheap capital for control of our resources, it’s time to be audacious and share the risk in collective African investment.

This is the future for Africa.

By Rutendo Bereza Matinyarare of Frontline Strat Marketing Consultancy.