With Thundafund we did initially have our dev partners in Bulgaria, that’s where the actual programs were based. What we realized over here, was, and actually our initial tech partners were based in the UK, and the dev team in Bulgaria [...]. But we discovered that having your tech partners in another country, while it made financial sense it was a nightmare when it came to cultural and social diferences. What I mean by that is they run on an Orthodox Christian calendar, and we run on the Western Christian calendar—Easter happens this weekend, Easter happens that weekend. We’re on holiday, they’re on holiday. Thirty holidays, 30 days of holiday in South Africa, 30 days holiday in Bulgaria— 60 days in which neither of us can actually work. You just don’t think of that stuf, well we didn’t, so it became an absolute nightmare.
Other local players turn to complementary service oferings, confirming the results of our research into the uses of crowdfunding in Europe and North America. Whether in the case of project creators or platform entrepreneurs, numerous examples show how fundraising becomes a pretext for (or a prelude to) other activities, like marketing or brokering. As an example, Gerhard Maree, founder of Citysoirée, a South African social financing site for private concerts, reoriented his oferings toward consultancy and services such as audience profiling, marketing, and ticket management for shows organized by third parties via the platform: ‘I think Citysoirée’s brand as a creative entity has become more valuable than as a crowdfunding platform.’
- Exogenous Players and International Organizations
Within the context of our research we have been confronted by the importance of very active exogenous stakeholders seeking to create ‘inclusive’ dynamics in the interests of large industrial or financial groups or that of the economic powers they represent and assist (in particular the embassies of major Western powers). In West Africa, this type of process is typically encouraged by international organizations like the United Nations Program for Development (UNPD), as well as by supranational financial bodies like InfoDev1 and the World Bank, WAEMU2, and CBWAS3. In our research we were able to interview at length a representative of the French company Orange who was in charge of developing digital economy initiatives in West Africa. Having pointed out that he was not ‘a great expert in development aid’—which he argues is fundamentally counterproductive—he explained Orange’s general approach, which consists in ‘contributing to endogenous development’ by developing ‘an SME ecosystem using digital technologies’. To this end, the group deploys a long term strategy that will most likely be unprofitable in the early stages, ‘opening local funds, on a per-country basis, run locally by local teams’: ‘the aim of those who invest in these vehicles is not to make money, or to lose it, but above all to consolidate the stronger SMEs and guide them toward better instruments that are a little larger and more profitable.’ Careful to make it known that these funds operate ‘autonomously’, he clarifies:
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