Today at the House of Commons in London, the first-ever tech-enabled trade agency to promote trade between the UK and Africa will be launched.
This is one of the world’s first ever technology-enabled trade agencies created to promote bilateral trade between the UK and Sub-Saharan Africa, it is backed by a device agnostic cutting-edge trading and collaboration platform which provides technology resources and practical tools to subscribers.
The event will be attended by Public Sector officials representing both the UK and sub-Saharan Africa, along with representatives from the private sector including KPMG, BT, DLA Piper and TNT, who have already signed up as commercial partners of Africa House and are set to benefit from the full set of services offered by the new trade agency’s technology platform.
According to a statement made available to Innovation Village, the new trade agency aims to secure long term, sustainable trade and wealth building for both the UK and Africa and is backed by a cutting-edge trading and collaboration platform. The platform, which is device-agnostic, provides technology resources and practical tools to facilitate successful trade between UK and African companies.
Commenting on the launch of the new trade agency, Africa House’s Chairman, Andrew Boff, said: “Africa House has been developed with mobile technology in mind and the platform we have developed is geared towards how Africa is doing business and communicating. Subscribers of the Africa House platform can interact freely with counterparties and access market data through a range of devices, including mobile phones and tablets.
Africa’s approach to business is in many ways more modern and tech enabled than the more developed markets with which it trades. Sub-Saharan Africa has a strong track record delivering banking, aid and development through mobile phones. The classic example of this is M-PESA, the mobile-phone based money transfer and micro financing service which operates in Kenya and Tanzania.”
Africa House’s technology platform is powered by the technology and consulting firm AMPP Group, whose proprietary cloud-delivered collaboration technology allows subscribers of the Africa House platform to access and participate in webinars, video conferencing, secure file sharing, instant messaging and public and private discussions.
Commenting on Africa House’s technology platform, AMPP Group’s CEO, Pierre Proner, said: “In deploying its proprietary suite of collaboration technologies for Africa House, AMPP has created what is effectively a cross between LinkedIn and Google Apps. It brings together the social networking elements of LinkedIn, providing users with access to a network of companies in the UK and Sub-Saharan Africa looking for trading partners and customers. Whilst at the same time, simialr to the function of Google Apps for Work, it allows users to actively collaborate, from discussing sensitive transactions through secure messaging and video conferencing, thereby saving counterparties the cost and time of flying between the UK and Africa, right up to securely sharing contracts or presentations, all within the same end-to-end collaboration platform space.”
Africa House also provides its subscribers with up to date access to market data on Africa supplied via AMPP’s sophisticated “big data” analytics engine which uses data algorithms to collate market indices, news and business trends to demonstrate the current and projected performance of key markets in Africa and identify opportunities for businesses working in the region.
