TLS 2017 | Workshops

The Workshop on start-ups will offer participants insights on opportunities and challenges to succeed as a start-up entrepreneur in SSA. It will examine the challenges and success stories of start-up businesses. The workshop will centre upon the story of how selling water to domestic and industrial customers became a successful business model. The story will be told by sustainable-water-solutions expert, Victoria Quaye, CEO of NaaviQ Co. Ghana. Participants will learn about business models overcoming barriers that often stand in the way of young entrepreneurs and leaders in SSA. The Workshop will be interactive and very practical. We will take personal experiences into account, find simple solutions to frequently occurring problems and bust some popular myths. We are excited to welcome everyone who is interested in competitive startups, social projects and young leadership. The workshop will build on one of the United Nations’ ‘Sustainable Development Goal Nr. 6. “healthy, affordable and safe water for all”.

In this fast-moving world, in which digitalization increasingly leads the way, the aim of the workshop is to get an insight into digitalization in Sub-Sahara Africa (SSA). With Bunmi Banjo, the workshop will be led by a well-renowned expert. Thanks to her experience in the corporate world and, more specifically, her current responsibilities as a Head of Brand & Digital Skills for Google in Africa, she will be able to give us valuable insights. In her position as project manager of the Digital Skills for Africa program, she helps connect millions of people with each other, and to grow their digital skills in order to improve their global employability. The workshop will appeal to anyone interested in discussing the benefits of digitalization in SSA.

Our workshop „Sustainable Business Strategies in Agro-Industry“ is about innovative business models in Sub-Saharan Africa, which are not only commercially profitable but also success stories in terms of a positive impact on civil society and the environment. Our aim is to understand such strategies and business models based on an example and to extrapolate our results into a wider context of application. For that purpose, the workshop will commence with a short input followed by questions and a discussion Specifically, we are dealing with the business model of Amatheon Agri, a Berlin-based farming and food processing company operating in Sub-Saharan Africa. The workshop will examine how responsible agri investments can create win-win scenarios both for companies and communities, and how the combination of large-scale and small-scale farming is critical for the future. The workshop will be led by Carl H. Bruhn. Mr. Bruhn is founder and CEO of Amatheon Agri Holding NV. A trained agronomist and experienced entrepreneur, he has been in the agribusiness sector for more than 20 years. Previously, Mr. Bruhn was the Head of Mergers & Acquisitions at Nordmilch, and the Executive Director of Sachsenmilch Group – one of the leading German dairy companies. In 2004, he started his own farm management, agri-consulting and bioenergy company before, since 2011, focusing entirely on Amatheon.

Sub-Saharan Africa being one of the fastest growing areas in the world, the question of how to plan and set up sustainable urbanization processes is unavoidable. How may possible solutions look like if cities grow by over 100'000 inhabitants per year? What does urbanization from an African perspective include and require? What can Europe learn from it? How can society as a whole benefit from it? The aim of the workshop is get an overview about the challenges of Africa’s incredibly fast urban development and discuss inclusive strategies to tackle this development. The workshop will be held by Mandu dos Santos Pinto, Architect ETH, a specialist in sustainable construction and sustainable urban development. He is an architect and consultant on urban development in Africa. His company, MANDU|architexture & urbanizm, focuses on the development of innovative and sustainable solutions in an urban African context. Mandu dos Santos Pinto is an advisor to governmental and other institutions, and conducts urban development and infrastructure projects in an international context. Everyone who is interested in the urbanization process and the general development of Sub-Sahara Africa is welcome to participate!

The governance workshop led by Dr Bolaji Olumuyiwa Omitola will offer participants a broad range of insights about the current challenges and future prospects of African Governance. Dr. Omitola, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Osun State University in Nigeria and a renowned expert in Political Sciences will discuss the following topics with participants. Africa is defined by diverse languages and cultures. After the end of colonialism, African nationalists successfully mobilized diverse cultural groups around the common project of political freedom. At the same time concessions in the form of sub-national autonomy were granted to local elites. This was short-lived as cultural domination of some groups by others became the norm. The emerging ruling groups did not only disentangle themselves from traditional leaders and regional power brokers, but also accumulated state resources in the center. These developments reduced the anticipated trickle-down effects in terms of economic development. Some of the crises of governance witnessed on the continent has been ascribed to the developments explained above. Leaders not only lost touch with the people but also remain unaccountable. Such alienation has produced regional inequalities leading to disintegrative tendencies among disenchanted groups. However, recent data show that Africa is making substantial progress. Development in the fields of agricultural production and business, trade, ICT, and tourism benefit from African heterogeneity. Governance in Africa ought to aim at mobilizing the inherent advantages of diversity to further sustainable development. Africa needs to increase dialogue among its cultures, tapping into their strengths. Such is particularly important regarding cultures with translocal or transcultural values of leadership and governance, to reposition the continent to be able to manage the challenges of a globalized world. We are excited to welcome everyone who is interested in governance (especially in the Sub-Saharan context) to join this workshop and to discuss some of the challenges and prospects outlined above with us.

As our world is transforming, our understanding of leadership naturally has to transform as well. Many traditional approaches and solutions are not applicable to our global society anymore. Against the backdrop of globalization, the aim of this workshop is to find answers to questions on how to develop a transformational, transcultural, and responsible leadership approach that is addressing current and future leadership challenges, focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa. We will reach that goal by offering an interactive workshop which will be structured as follows:  The first part of the workshop will be an input, the second part an interactive group session, and the third part, a discussion. Topical concepts of transformational change and responsible leadership will be presented to find answers to the main questions: What does transcultural and transformational change actually mean? And how does leadership take place in this process? In the interactive part, we focus on the practical implications of these concepts for leaders, organizations, and processes. The workshop will be headed by two experts in the field. Dr. Angelica V. Marte is a Visiting Researcher at the Leadership Excellence Institute Zeppelin | LEIZ, an entrepreneur, a documentary film maker and a certified executive coach with leadership experience in several management positions at various companies. Prof. Derick de Jongh is the Founding Director of the Albert Luthuli Centre for Responsible Leadership at the University of Pretoria and a well-known expert for leadership in general and responsible leadership in particular.

In a globalized world where people from different cultures routinely come into contact, on what basis should they interact with each other? In particular, given international problems such as climate change, forced migration, sustainable development and infectious diseases, how should those with different values relate? Too often Western values have become the default position in the context of global conventions and engagements. What would a more evenhanded and inclusive approach involve? Prof. Thaddeus Metz will present two major answers. One is to discover pre-existing values that are universally shared, while another is to create values that would be reasonable for all those from a variety of cultures to accept. This presentation articulates a version of the latter approach, and argues that it is more promising than the former. In the workshop, you will become familiar with the presented ideas. There will be space for debate and you will get to know thought experiments on the topic. In the end, you will have explored two alternative ways to cope with global transculturality. Prof. Thaddeus Metz is currently Distinguished Research Professor (2015-2019) at the University of Johannesburg. Author of more than 200 books, articles and chapters, he is a globally renowned expert in the fields of African values and cross-cultural ethics. Most recently, he taught a seminar at Kyoto University, Japan, on Confucianism and the southern African ethic of ubuntu; gave the 4th Distinguished Scholarly Lecture on African Philosophy at the University of Calabar in Nigeria; and delivered a talk on what sub-Saharan values entail for Chinese development projects on the African continent at a gathering in Beijing hosted by the Chinese Ministry of Culture. Everyone that is interested in moral goods is very welcome to participate!

This workshop is about the design of knowledge transfer processes in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our aim is to understand such processes and to explore how they can become success stories for different stakeholders. Specifically, we are focusing on operations of SAP SE, the market leader in enterprise application software. Knowledge is an essential part of these operations and influences leadership in business and society. Projects of SAP are empowering local communities and organizations to work efficiently. One step to achieve this is the “Africa Code Week” where children are taught coding skills to open a path to a successful future. This workshop will appeal to those interested in how knowledge can be transferred to achieve better leadership in various global and local contexts.