Business leaders across Africa have noted that technology remains an important element for businesses to grow and thrive in the continent.
The business leaders stated this during the 2021 edition of the Africa Business Summit held in Lagos, adding that the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant lockdown and restriction of movements largely impacted business ecosystem on the continent.
While agreeing that many businesses folded up during the pandemic, they noted that technology proved a veritable tool for others to survive across the continent.
Morocco-based Chief Executive Officer of Africa My Own, Karimi Ahanem, submitted that COVID -19 has come to stay, stressing that business owners and Africans must chart ways to live with it.
Ahanem advised business czars present at the summit to employ the use of technology as one of the opportunities to leverage in the new normal.
“The new normal which COVID-19 necessitated has only enjoined business lieutenants to embrace the use of technology and social media. That is the now a necessity,” she said.
During a panel session, the Chairman of the Omoluabi Empire Holdings, Victor Eniola-Mark, agreed that the new wave of the COVID-19 pandemic is a trying time for businesses in the country but noted that a smart business owner will remain on the toes to ensuring that such business does not fold up and make the economy shrink.
“We must keep business going despite the new normal. Smart businessmen lookout for the opportunity in every situation.
“COVID-19 is here and there’s at present very little we can do about it. Business owners must wear their thinking caps to think rigorously because the economy is dependent on the thriving capacity of our businesses and we can’t afford to fail them,” Mark said.
Other speakers at the summit including a presidential candidate in The Gambia, Ismala Ceesay, also opined that to survive in the COVID-19 pandemic, a chief executive must be “up and doing.”
Meanwhile, on the sideline of the event, Mark and select business leaders were decorated and inducted as fellows of the Chartered Institute of Management and Leadership.
The group chairman of Ojulowo Omoluabi Empire Holdings said: “The reward for hard work is more work, as a company and the group chairman, Ojulowo Omoluabi Empire Holdings, we understand that those awarding us today wants us to do more work and we won’t let them down.
“It is part of our cardinal objectives to help uplift the youth and the poor through affordable housing units across our estates. This we shall continue to do and do even more.”
