EU-Africa Trade & Investment Conference July 2010

African Participants

Kenya

CDSL
Community Development Systems Limited-Community Development Systems Limited CDSL is a holding company that was set-up by like mindedirectors whose Vision was to make Kenya a developed First World country. Our Mission therefore is to develop solutions that create wealth for Kenyans and also solutions that eliminate barriers to wealth creation.  The companies under the group are:

1. Mobile Pay Limited (software technology development),
2. Metropolitan Bank Limited (commercial bank),
3. Wades Limited (asset depository and exchange systems) and
4. Tangaza Limited (E-commerce and Money transfer service).

The group identified that a shortage of money supply is the key barrier to financing development in thiscountry. Kenya is choking with resources and for Kenya to be a First World, development has to be financed internally in a revolutionary format that addresses all the key challenges that have existed before. CDSL decided to be the example that the rest of the country can follow to build Kenya. CDSL therefore decided to find investors to set-up a local and international payment infrastructure.

 Currently CDSL has achieved the following:

Built 2 data centres, one primary and the other redundant to cater for I.T. infrastructure Requirements of the commercial bank and the E-commerce and money transfer solution.

Built all the software required to run the infrastructure. Currently we own all the software that is riving our systems, from Core Banking Applications to Stock trading systems. We are currently trading live on the Nairobi Stock exchange on pilot bases.

Built the interconnection infrastructure with the existing mobile phone network operators, we are interconnected with all four operators and systems are live and working perfectly.

By implementing the above CDSL envisions that it will be able create millions of jobs by financing development of massive infrastructure, high technology and other projects in targeted areas and therefore move Kenya to the next level.

Ethiopia 

 Zemedeneh Negatu
 Managing Partner, Ernst & Young Ethiopia 
 Enginner Tadesse Tessema, an engineer by profession used to live in the Netherlands. He established Holland Car P.L.C as a joint venture company established in 2005 by a Holland (Dutch) Company named Trento BV, Engineering and Engineer Tadesse Tessema an Ethiopian National, with an initial capital of $ 1 Million.. The company is the first of its kind in Ethiopia.

Eleni Gabre-Madhin
CEO, Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX)
Gabre-Madhin left her earlier job, as a World Bank senior economist in Washington, DC, in part because she was disturbed by the 2002 famine in Ethiopia after a bumper crop of maize the year before. With prices depressed, many farmers simply left their grain in the field in 2001. But when the rains failed in 2002, a famine of 1984 proportions threatened the country. Her dream: to build a market that protects the African farmer, who is too often living at the mercy of forces beyond his or her control. Currently she is CEO of the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange which is the first commodities market in Ethiopia, bringing rates and standards (not to mention trading  

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