Building Sustainable Economies

All right, let's get started. We are going to spend the second session in the afternoon about on what it takes to build sustainable economies and as you can see we have got Ali on drums and Jo' Schwenke on acoustic guitar and Alan Patricof on the bass, so we are ready to go. Give them a hand. Well you heard it hear last night, I think Larry Brilliant said it that having a job is at the top of the wish list for poor people wherever he goes and in fact surveys suggests that people rank having a job as the highest mechanism for improving their lives. And that's also true for leaders of poor nations that's why we see things like the NEPAD initiative, the New Partnership for African Development, creation of jobs is right up there on their priority list. Well who creates those jobs? You scratch the surface of any successful job generation machine and you will find a dynamic group of entrepreneurs who have risen from startups. In the United States as we all know small businesses provide roughly three out of four of the net new jobs added to the economy. By generating jobs and serving the underserved, promoting innovations, spurring productivity, the development of the indigenous private sector can raise lives throughout the economy. Here we are going to focus on those enterprises that are kind of in the middle of the spectrum. Those that are likely to generate employment to go beyond the family in terms of job's creation, the most likely to result in innovation and investment and ultimately capital investment. But if small enterprise is the sweet spot for job's creation and innovation, financing for this group is what we might call the missing middle in so many of these economies. The class of those enterprises with the greatest potential to grow is still too small and unproven to depend on commercial financing or internal cash flow. And too large to rely on most of the financing mechanisms that are available to them which is family and friends or short term high interest rate loans from from banks. As you know in the sophisticated markets like the United States a promising business could attract patient risk capital from venture funds or from angel investors which would also bring strategic oversight which is just virtually non-existent in a lot of poor economies. If you think about it, if Google had to rely on the kind of financing that's available in most African countries, I don't think we would be sitting here on this very lovely campus tonight. And so the question is how do we get from here to there? And the panel is here to tell you and show you by their own experience that it's possible and it's imperative to overcome these obstacles. So with that what we are going to do is have a conversation among the panelists. Let me start with Jo' Schwenke. He is the Managing Director of Business Partners who has been helping to finance start-ups for over 20 years. And if I have my information right he has financed about 30,000 businesses at this juncture. So you've got a quarter century experience. Tell us what it takes to nurture and support successful entrepreneurs in poor markets? Thanks Lael. I think perhaps to put the thing into perspective is if you look at the slide behind me you will see that I have put the It is. It's just slow. In Africa these things are a lot faster. You will see I have put the entrepreneur in the middle of that slide. And what we look for when we seek out people to support, we look for integrity, we look for doing skills, we look for business skills, we look for entrepreneurial talent, willingness to take risk, passion, mission, vision, determination and energy. There isn't a single entrepreneur or anyone who succeeds, who doesn't have boundless, boundless, boundless energy but with all of that. If you happen to be trying to run a business where there is no deal flow, I am sorry you are not going to succeed because you need deal flow. So you will see at the top of this slide I have enumerated the sources of deal flow which come from big business. Remember I am a small business financier. So big things create opportunity for small and medium businesses, so big agriculture very important and lots of little agriculture might result in big agriculture when you think about it provided it's done reasonably well. Big manufacturing, big mining, major tourism, modes of transport, seats of learning, seats of bureaucracy both government and the corporate sector, all those create the opportunity you will say how. Every time, for example, take the fact that the Google came here, that created a campus of 10,000 people. So the 10,000 people have to be fed, entertained have their bicycles fixed, have all that wonderful [0:05:47] ____ to heaven they have made. They have to be entertained. They have conferences from time to time which create additional thing. All that is done by entrepreneurs, by the sort of people I would finance. So all with out of those stimuli there would be nothing, there would be no opportunities for small or medium businesses. Its important to remember some of you have been saying in earlier sessions that to the best way you can help us in Africa is trade with us, give us opportunities to trade and because that, in turn, will create opportunities for these entrepreneurs that we finance. Inward investment provided it's done properly where the big investment comes in so you put a Google factory in Mali for example and they need to support that factory of of people, of experts with all of the supplies they buy and need, it will create an incredible stimulus and the multiplier will start working. In addition to all of that the the, in order for small or medium businesses to be successful there are these extraneous factors which, if they don't exist it makes our lives very, very difficult. Human capital if a primary, secondary, tertiary education and training is not there, if the stimulation of entrepreneurship is not there, if innovation isn't stimulated, if they are no universities a whole source of of ability for small or medium businesses is taken away. If you look at the governance issues imagine investing in a country where you cannot enforce contracts, I mean, this is I think to Americans inconceivable because I think you do use your quotes quite a lot. So socio-political stability, security, things that are very dear to all of us, I mean, there is no tourism without stability, without law and order and of course corruption. If there is corruption it adds a huge layer of cost and quite frankly most of us, if not all of us, will just refuse to go there and do business there. Infrastructure, if you have traveled in Africa, if you have driven from, we were joking about the other day but if - its literally true if you drive from Nairobi to Abuja, you don't drive on the road you drive next to the road because the potholes are smaller next to the road and they are nice and round they are not sort of tooth cavity shaped. So the tax regime very, very important. One of the things that has been sorted out, thank God, thank you cell phones. Telecommunications is to a very large extent a thing of the past wherever we are in Africa now we can have normal easy conversations. Energy, a friend of ours in the previous panel was talking about power failures in Nigeria. We in South Africa, to our absolute horror had some power failures recently when when our nuclear power stations had one of its sets fail. Its its adds huge cost. If you are going to start hiring generators and then last but not least sensible financial institutions do help. So you can see my organizations plays but a tiny part in all of this. All those other factors are important and it does give all of you, though, enormous scope because you can support much of that because you will see health is also one of the issues under human capital and of course the all pervasive climate change is there as well. So there is huge potential for help and to make it easier to finance SMEs. All right, let me now go to the other side of that financing relationship. Ali Mufuruki is the Chairman and CEO of Infotech Investment Group in Tanzania. Ali you started up a number of businesses in Tanzania and you have had both successes but I have also heard you talk about challenges along the way. Tell us a little bit about those obstacles and what were the critical enabling factors that ultimately allowed you to succeed? Thanks Lael. The story that I am going to tell may sound boring to you, given that you live in an environment where the business environment is so mature where almost everybody including school kids understand business models, understand finance basic finance at least for business. I come from a country that until recently was socially strong where business was not encouraged and was not even started and we still have serious challenges in terms of finding people who can help you run a business when you have a good idea of running one or you have money to run a business. So when 8 years ago I got an opportunity to to own an operated franchise of a big South African brand in my country, I had a number of problems that I had to overcome. First of all to get the money that I needed and I couldn't get the money from the bank but there was a venture capital fund that was willing to invest in my business. But then they wanted to invest on condition that I run the business and I was a bit rewarded because I am an engineer by training. I didn't have a lot of experience of running a business of the kind that we were about to get started to run. But the condition was either I run the business because I was only the person they knew and they could trust with the money or there is no money. So I said, "Okay I will do it." They said you have to take out the insurance because you could die. They said this is called Key-man insurance and I was wondering what's wrong with these guys. So I took out the Key-man insurance and then they said you have to have a proper board. You know, that oversees the business and gives policy directions. And I was beginning to get irritated at a certain point, these guys that were not my notion of running my own business because before that I had to run my own business for about ten years in the IT space. It was easy to run I didn't need a lot of help; I sold the knowledge I had. But now I had to buy things and sell things. I needed more money and these guys were very intrusive in the way they wanted to partner with me. Okay so we set up a board and then they said you also need to sign up our business principles that forbid you from engaging in corruption, evading taxes or by the way you have to be audited by one of the big five companies. I mean so many conditions. To cut the long story short I just decided because I didn't want to fail or to give up. I said, "Okay I am going to comply with all the conditions that you are imposing on me and we will see." In this business that I started as a significant shareholder, I had a friend also a Tanzanian whose is a self made businessman, very successful in what he does, but very traditional and who did not like at all the idea of having a board where these venture capitalists also had a seat and they came and licked up to us about what to do and what not to do. And every time we would leave a board meeting he would tell me why don't you just teach these guys? And not being an MBA not being very skilled in running business I saw the value that these people were actually bringing to the table. I saw something that I wanted to learn in being more professional being more bit disciplined and I could see that by having them on board I got more respect and credibility with financial institutions that were providing us with loan part of our business and and I was learning something interesting that I didn't learnt at school or did not have an opportunity to learn in my previous business experience. That did not prevent me as seal the business from failing. Two or three years later in the business we faced certain some - certain things happened in the business in the retail space, in our part of the world that I had not foreseen and sales collapsed, stock was overflowing everywhere and cash was getting very tight. But working with these guys with the venture capitalist partners and the core stuff that we had built over the three years we were actually able to come up with a strategy to fix their problems, top their losses, turn around the business and now looking back eight years after we started we've already bought out the venture capitalist. We turn around our business and we are making money and we are operating in two countries not just in Tanzania. So I learnt one important lesson that you don't solve a problem, a development problem, like the one that I faced by throwing money at it. You have to create local capacity. You have to create local leadership and that's what these guys actually help me create. In the process to adjust myself who got an opportunity to learn but also a lot of people in my business, who are Tanzanians or who are Ugandans where we now also have a business who got an opportunity to learn, how to run a business using modern business principles, being very transparent with authorities, being transparent with staff and knowing how to fall and get up again when you hit a hump on the road. So that is an experience I thought I should share with you as I said, it's probably boring for you but for us it's an everyday thing. And it's an everyday experience that is not no more, that a lot of people are still learning to grapple with but it is something that we need, capacity building in how to run businesses and creating local leadership, creating local capabilities to be able to run businesses. Terrific! So Alan Patricof everybody I think now knows is currently founder and manager of Greycroft but is also one of the architect's of venture capital industry here in the US and he has made some good investments it sounds like but also failed to invest in Google at the right moment. But we will forgive on that. He has also been a proponent for entrepreneurship really for your entire life. And I know you now particularly concerned that the opportunities for entrepreneurs in the developing world are extremely limited because of the lack of appropriate capital. Can you talk a little bit about that limitation and also suggest ways that we here in this room can do something to address that problem? Thank you. There are two salesmen shoe salesmen who were sent from United States to go to the most remote parts of Africa. One of them calls on his cell phone to his boss and says, "I am coming back tomorrow, no body here wears shoes." The other salesmen in another village calls up his company says, "This is the greatest opportunity. I am moving here, everybody needs shoes." Everybody in Africa metaphorically needs shoes. The opportunities in the developing world are enormous. For everything you see around you whether it's the carpeting, whether it's the tables, whether it's the microphones, or whether it's the lighting or the buildings whatever, all of those are opportunities for the right type of people, the right entrepreneurs to build organizations in the developing world. For the last four or five years as I mentioned before I had about Harold Rosen and I traveled with Harold and other other organizations and I have been all around the world mostly in Africa. And have visited many small and medium sized businesses. And have listened to their problems and their frustrations and without exception it is a continent, Africa in particular, I am going to focus on, where there is enormous frustrations - frustration. People and many of you in this room and maybe there is enlightenment but that's taken place over the last couple of years but microfinance is the flavor of the month. I can't tell you the number of times I have been at meetings like this and everybody talks about small and medium sized enterprises and talks about their microfinance bank, their microfinance secured secured lending, their microfinance activities. And for those you don't know and I maybe off and I can be corrected but I am not that far off the average microfinance loan is about 300, $400. I see some people shaking their heads, so I am close. There are organizations today that will as I understand it go up further up to several thousand and even in some cases I have heard of a $10,000 loan. Most micro-financed loans are at very high interest, have very short maturities. And are really done, given to subsistence living businesses. Their businesses that employ the person who gets it may be their wife or husband, their children and it's very small, contained in a very small area and it has very, very little potential for exponential job growth. You don't build businesses with $10,000 or certainly $350 dollar at loans. You don't build businesses with loans. I have and I will, thank you. I will make this with, you know, some qualifications because you can never be a 100 percent correct but I will say I have virtually seen no business in my travels which was financed with pure equity. Everybody is working with borrowed funds which, for the most part, have high interest rates, for the most part are secured by all their assets. Ali may, I don't know, whether he had any security because he was getting for venture capital firm. They are short term and they have short amortization. I will say again definitively you can't build businesses when you are paying interest from the outset and when you have retired on a short term basis. You are in Google campus. Google was financed with equity, I didn't invest because I never had the opportunity to invest and I can't tell you I would have because I could tell you that privately the ones I turned down. This one I didn't turn down I just didn't see it. If I drew a line 50 or 100 miles from this point we are sitting at and there are thousands of businesses I will give something to anybody who will go in any door unannounced an asked them if got, if they started their business or built their business or anything but equity capital. I have been in the venture business for 37 years. I have operated in 12 countries not just the United States. I am part of the industry which has backed thousands of companies. I have never and I am only to say virtually. I have never seen a company financed with anything but equity. Now I have traveled all around the developing world particularly in Africa and I have virtually, here I am using the word the modifier, virtually never seen a company that was financed with anything other than debt. Now it seems to me there is something to be learnt from that, here we have the greatest successful entrepreneurial environment in the world. Tremendous success stories Google being one of them. All based on risk taking, the reason they are based on risk taking because if you fail with equity capital you can go bankrupt but you have the opportunity to come back again and still keep your house and still keep your cars, still keep all your assets and start again and you will read in this county and in the developed world countless stories of people who are serial entrepreneurs who have failed once, twice and three times it's like marriages and come back and sooner or late you get it right. It, as a matter of fact, it's a sign of success not success it's a sign of maturity, it's a sign of of experience when you have failed in this country. And so I have spent a lot of time in the last several years focusing on the need for equity capital and I have made a kind of a cause of going around and trying to encourage people to think about equity, now the reason they haven't put equity in is because the exits are limited we are at a stage of development in the developing world where this is not a place to get rich, this is not - this is a place that is designed for people like all of you in this audience. You may not realize it but the venture capital industry in this country was really took its origins from foundations. The first people in this business were Venrock, part of the Rockefeller family. JH Whitney, the Mellon family, they were the foundations that were the ones not the pension funds its not the AT&T and General Motors pension funds they were the the people in endowments and foundations who, and to this day they have the highest concentration in this area of investment. You heard Larry Brilliant last night say, they want jobs. You heard Tim Worth say we can't look at this from 30000 feet we have got to get close down. The only way you create jobs is to create businesses that are built to have a multiplier effect. There are hundreds of graduates coming out of the business schools in Africa whether its Lagos or South Africa or Cape Town or Kenya and most of those people are not finding jobs and they are and if they want to start something entrepreneurial they are frustrated that they are not getting the opportunity. You also have hundreds of Africans who are in this country who are going to business schools and coming out and most of them not going back. Why? Because they don't feel they can get the financing to start businesses and use their skills and it's easier to go to work for Goldman Sachs. I give a talk recently at Columbia to a seminar of 17 students from Africa and I asked, how many of you are going back. Not one of them, not one and that's a tragedy and the reason is because if they have if they are Larry Page or Sergey there is no one around who is going to give them that kind of capital. If they have built a small business and they want to expand and they have done the right things to expand it no one is prepared to give them the equity capital. They can get the debt in small amounts, limited time periods, high interest rates. So I think this is a place that all of you in this audience should be thinking seriously about if you really want to help in job creation. If you wanted and I am not wanted to, I am not talking against microfinance. It is critical, it is doing a very important function but it is not going to build the kind of businesses that are going to employ thousands of people over the years. Look at how many people Google has. Google is not even what nine years old and employs 10,000 people and who knows there maybe someone in Arusha who is a potential Google technology person. So we heard someone today say that we need hybrid types of organizations. There are concepts around which involve 501(c)3 contributions pure equity, technical assistance, we got to bring them all together technical assistance is a critical area and I urge you all to think about it. I know Jo' Schwenke very well. Jo has done an amazing job really, truly and I am - Ali and I did not know each other well before although I know about him because he is part of the Aspen leadership institute from, for Africa which I've been somewhat involved with through with TechnoServe but Jo I have been. I have been to Africa and I have seen him and I know what he is doing but he is dealing with lifestyle entrepreneurs. He is not dealing with Larry Pages and the Sergeys and think about that or the Steve jobs or the guy who builds tents for parties and wants to have 500 of them. I was in Africa not so long ago and I met someone who had a business of of renting toilets to parties. He had three or 400 toilets. That's a business and he had wanted to expand, but he couldn't get capital to expand outside of the city he was in. Now it may not be dramatic and it may not be exciting but those are the kind of businesses that can employ more people. So I will rest with that and take your questions later. All right. Well we heard here you don't build businesses with loans but Jo you do. So tell us a little bit about your model. It's all about terminology. We don't get hung up about equity or loans. If you go to the entrepreneurs in Africa they don't want you to take the equity, they don't want you when you finance them to take 80 or 90 percent of the ownership of their companies. So what we did after a while, we we restructured the deal. We worked out the IRR as if we taken a fair deal and taken our share, we then restructure with minority equity which is the kicker. We take - we give a loan at prime. We take the rest of our money in the form of our royalty which we take after carefully modeling conservatively the cash flow when the business can afford it. So its all about terminologies, so the reason why you need equity to start any business, so if Google had come to us and I did that size and I had the wisdom to see the that it was a winner I would have done Google and that would have been probably happier with me because I would have taken a smaller share holding. But which is kind of stupid really because I could have made a lot more money if I have taken a bigger share holding because at the end of the day the royalty that I take would have been on the IRR that I predicted, not the IRR that eventually this business make because I think we did a little sum. I think they have multiplied that original $25 million a thousand times. So, I mean that's one hell of a success. We don't have that sort of wonderful success in Africa but I think the important issue is this that if you are looking for up to US $2 million in South Africa, in Madagascar and Kenya and Mozambique where I operate you will find you will find capital to start or expand your business in the nature of equity and that is what's its about. How do we behave, not what you call it. How do we behave and we will not close you down, we will not behave like bankers, we are not bankers. We are investors. We like to say we have a hate and we have a heart. We were founded by an industrialist, we are, what I think you guys have been calling a hybrid. So Dr. Rupert founded us and his intention with our business is that it is a full profit but that all the profit gets ploughed back. So we have grown our company from something like 178 million to 2 billion and we ploughed all back and we keep doing our business and when our bonuses get calculated 60 percent depends on how profitable we are and 40 percent depends on how developmental we have been. How many woman we financed in our country. Growing the black ownership of businesses is a big issue in the countries. The other countries that we operate, believe it or not, there also it is important that one doesn't finance yet another foreigner in those countries but local people. So we do care about the local people and get them going. It is true, we do mainly lifestyle investing and that is what it's all about. I mean, in your country if you take a walk down any of your streets or any of your industrial areas or any of your service office blocks. Those are life style business and that is what the middle class is all about okay and that is what's missing on our continent. We do not have a middle class, we do not have an SME sector. So we need scale, so we I can't go about running a venture fund and doing two or three or five investments a year, I do a thousands investments a year. We are members of the South African Venture Capital Association and we mess up all their statistics because we do three quarters of all the deals. So they show the figures with business partners and the figures without business partners because we bring the average down. Okay because we do so many deals. So - but I think the important message its not about, is it Alan's model or Jo's model? It's both, its And. We need a fund like Alan wants and but more importantly and this is the part, if you do get him you have got to get him to run it because it's about the people running the fund. You can't have a banker or a youngster, a kid running a venture capital fund in Africa because they won't know when Google comes to them. And then that is also the other issue. I have that problem in my business where the the decision making is a lot easier but I have people running I have 14 funds that I run. I have guys with 10 to 20 years experience running those funds, below them I have level of guys with 5 to 10 years experience and then I have the youngsters. I have about 300 people working in the company so so at the end of the day but it's about bulk, it's about volume, it's about building people. We have financed as Lael said 30,000 businesses. We have created, not we, the entrepreneurs have created so we have helped them create 500,000 jobs. We have created - we estimate wealth in the hands of our entrepreneurs of about US $2 to US $5 billion. We are very, very proud of that. So it's it's 'And' we need Alan's fund, we need a fund that does the sort of the thing that we do. Alan, I just wanted to ask you a little bit. Jo talked about growing the middle class and he also talked earlier about the kind of regulatory and policy environments that many entrepreneurs are operating in poor countries, lack of contract enforcement, high levels of corruption. As you have succeeded, to what extent have you been able to organize with other small business owners to push for change within the country and to what extent is the government responsive in terms of creating a better business environment? Well obviously there are governments and there are governments. I mean we are talking about in Africa about 44 different countries. So some are better than others or some are worse than others. My experience is that the laws are less the problem than the enforcement of laws. In many cases there are laws, most cases there are laws that have been passed over the number of years. If you look at the World Bank Index which has been created in the last four or five years and you can see the progress that's been made in a lot of these countries in terms of their legal systems and the introduction of important elements and I think this is a trend that is only going to go in one direction which is getting better and believe it not, the MCC is helpful in that, Transparency International is helpful on that and the business community in itself is helpful and I think that the more, what I am talking about, obviously for the equity type of funds that I am talking about, you are talking about the leading entrepreneurs. Everything I agree with everything Jo says except he has to point out, he is really unique and the only one doing what he is doing and secondly I do question whether he would have financed Google. That that I and I don't mean Google in itself, I mean the, you know, the companies that we are talking about that are very high multiplier employment type organizations although obviously he has just giving you the numbers which are really staggering and I, its there are public records so there is, so its not just hearsay, but I I think that the laws are getting better, I think that for example we had this in this country when we have started the venture business it was a new concept. Partnerships were a new concept and we had to work very hard to get changes in the regulations and they have improved gradually over the years in fact there is there is new pending legislations right now to make it even more encouraging to support the growth of young businesses - up to a certain size. So I think that the introduction of new sources of capital that will only operate in the right kinds of environments will encourage the development of appropriate legislation. But you have to understand, Jo operates out of South Africa and South Africa is not the same as sub- Saharan Africa. You have a very different financial and business infrastructure, different levels of business skills and also different level of government support. I know that Jo has ventured outside South Africa recently and he is going to discover that doing business in our part of the world comes with a significant number of challenges but also opportunities and I have no doubt he is going to succeed but he may have to make some modifications to his business model. I would very much love to do business with with Alan who who is an all equity guy. I want to agree that when you take a loan in my part of the world you are talking about paying back at interest rates of 17, 18, 22, 24 percent. Now to be able to pay back a loan at that kind of interest rates you have to be making very huge profits that are very difficult to make. So sometimes it's like even the lenders are setting themselves up for failure when they invest in a business that's going to take sometime to make money for pay back. Then may be that's why it would be a smarter idea once you have understood what the business is all about and that you have the right people to manage the business and you have checked out the regulatory environment to go into any equity heavy kind of investment and make it scalable and see if you are not going to succeed better there. I I have a feeling that Alan for the kind of size of deals that he wants to chase in Africa will be successful because I know that others have tried to stick to the old fashion principle. I I see we are here all this week they know and that they used to wait two to three years for a single deal to come along and and its because they were insisting. Either on lending a huge amount of money that the business environment is not able to absorb or when you find people who want to take the money and they don't have the managerial capability to actually run the business or they find that actually the rates at which they are borrowing are simply not sustainable. Going back to the business environment is changing as a function of of the shrinking of the world. Now we know because there is a lot of information there is television, there is the internet, our Governments are not immune to that kind of influences. They also begin to realize that the poverty problem will only be solved if the people within the countries are working, if the people are investing in businesses and they are beginning to learn to be business friendly. We also are seeing more people with education venturing into business. It used to be not, traditionally business was not the place where people with education in Tanzania used to go. If you are going to business then most probably you are not a very smart person, that's the way it used to be but now we are beginning to see that situation change and smarter people in business are beginning to influence government policy because they are able to lobby intelligently, they are able to come up with proposals for alternative policy and Tanzania in particular is one of the leading reformers in Africa, if I am not mistaken, even in the World Bank reports I have seen it's out there among the top 10 countries that have reformed the most in Africa. So we are very hopeful and we are beginning to attract investors including the likes of Alan and and we are seeing also institutional funding coming to Africa, microfinance coming to Tanzania in big ways. I am very hopeful that the next 10 years are going to be very important changes for my country and for the region. I guess, I am going to turn it over to the audience in one second so if you have questions please get ready. Just one final question, we have a lot of people in the room who are looking at these issues from the philanthropic perspective but have also been on the business and investment side. Alan started to get into this question of what's the right model for the financing. Is it a for-profit kind of financing investment, is it a 501(c)3 kind of philanthropic investment and if it's a hybrid is it a partnership or is it a single organization that's doing a bit of both. So I don't know who might want to respond to that first but Well, let let me answer because I have tried to play around with the model and I am not saying that all of it is perfect just you know. I consider this whole activity priming the pump I mean, you know, it's this whole cycle. You have got you don't have exits until you have the right companies that need exits and you don't have entrepreneurs coming out of the wood work board until they know there is capital. I I my experience has been in the years I have been. When money is available, equity money is available. People come out of the wood work who have great talent, who all of sudden believed that some things possible, I didn't think was possible before. The model I have been playing around with is was trying to respond to both people who have to make some return and I don't think you know, I could sit there and tell you this is you know, like most traditional people you are going to make 30 percent rates of return. It's not possible, in my opinion at this stage of the environment. But creating a model where there is a segment that is for modest profitability. Another segment which would be 501(c)3 type which would be a recycling fund which would maintain it's capital but not distribute anything. But which would be used perhaps for a second activity. But in the meantime would give some leverage to the first year who needs to help them make a return. And then the third component would be to get definitely would be grant type operation which would be a technical assistance component because I think that's critical and that would, of course, clearly be be charitable, philanthropic contribution. So as I have said to some people you can take one from column A, one from column B or one from column C or you can take one from all the columns and mix it up but the reason for doing this at this stage not 10 years from now is not because you want to get rich quick. If you want to do that go buy a private equity investment, go take it, limited partnership in a private equity firm in United States, which I have one. But if you and there is no guarantees. But but if you want to be really do what you want us to fulfill on a mission and to really encourage entrepreneurship and small or medium sized enterprise development and job creation then I think you can find in that combination I have said something that fits what your needs are. I would like to say something about Africa that's very different from what we have been talking about most of these past three days. And to see if as philanthropists maybe you can help me in coming up with an idea that can help safeguard Africa's future and help us see a more prosperous future, a prosperous Africa in the next 20 years. Two days ago I was in Washington. This is speaking at a meeting that was talking about issues of trade and whether the Doha Round is going to be revived, whether Africa is going to have better chances of trade. I heard even during this during this forum we people talking about whether chances for Africa's trade can be improved or conditions for trade. And people talk about African as if it is a very god forsaken poor place where there is a lot of people who are very poor and will never get rich until they are assisted. But they talk about how we are going to get more money for example out of cotton, how we are going to get more money out of coffee. And whereas there are real opportunities to do that, I personally don't see why we should continue doing a business whose time has come and gone unlike cotton. You all know that oil has been selling for $70 a barrel recently. And it's not regulated by the WHO, doesn't nobody even listens to the OPEC these days. You just sell to the highest bidder, not the most kind bidder and and Africa has 9.4 percent of all proven gas and oil reserves. But Africa has also 21 percent of the global gold production. Africa has the 27 percent of the global diamond production. Africa has 38 percent of the global Uranium product. Africa has 43 percent of global Bauxite production, 17 percent of all iron ore, 78 percent of all platinum. How poor can such a place be? Now there is something called the resource curse. There is nothing new about that. But we all know that the whole world including the United States that has made oil from Africa a strategic target, they want to get 25 percent of all US oil imports to come out of Africa by the year 2015. That's only eight years from now. I think it's a great opportunity for African countries that are producing oil. The question is how are we going to invest that wealth that we will make from our from the United States into developing our economies. The same thing is we - our trade with China has been growing in heaps and bounds and the you won't believe that the trade balance between Africa and China is actually positive for Africa. And there is no global or WHO deal between us. It's all as a result of bilateral trade arrangements. For once we are in a position where we can sell at the prices that we choose. We don't need Doha, we don't need WHO. We don't need AGOA even. So - but we are going to need support from good people of good intensions. To help us ensure that the endowment that we have been given by nature or by god, does not become a curse that it has been for Africa for most of these years. Is there a way the intelligent people in this room can come up with some proposals on how we can harness this wealth without destroying the environment too much, without killing each other too much as we have been doing these past few generations. That's a challenge I put to you.