‘Our promise is to bring 1million SMEs online by 2016 across Africa’ – Microsoft
Does your Company have a global plan for SME support? And how does this plan influence your product development process?
•As a company Microsoft is working to bring SMEs online to expand their customer base, create an SME ecosystem, providing them with affordable and relevant IT and non-IT related services and identify impactful apps that would enhance their productivity level. This is being possible through the BizSpark and the Microsoft Biz4Afrika programme.
•The BizSpark program aims to support entrepreneurship and help startups grow their business. By providing founders with access to leading technology products, business and technical support, and market visibility, Microsoft is assisting young companies in their early years, when they need it most. More than 50,000 startups from over 100 countries are enrolled in the program, with more than 1500 BizSpark Network Partners assisting startups through financial and legal .
•The Biz4Afrika SME portal as part of the 4Afrika initiative is an online platform that brings relevant resources and online services– both IT and non-IT – to SMEs across Africa, including accounting, legal, business administration, PR and HR services among others on a fermium model. Online presence (domain, email) strikes as the number one popular service among SMEs as it helps them being visible, searchable and easy to find. Up to date we’ve helped place 140,000 SMEs online to date across Africa.
What is your assessment of SMEs in Nigeria and what leverage can your company provide in terms of product offer or support programmes?
•From our learnings, every SME (including those in Nigeria) goes through three phases: 1) The startup or struggle phase. 2) The growing phase where they start to see profit. 3) The acceleration phase, where they start to look for partnerships to enhance their business. Based on these learnings, we are trying to educate the market, to be an ecosystem enabled for SMEs- so that the gap between the entities i.e. governments, Telco’s, big banks, and SME organizations can be eliminated.
•Using Cloud technology, SMEs don’t have the financial or technical burden of needing their own servers, premises or IT specialists. Everything they need can be accessed and done on the web anywhere, anytime and off any device. Having an online presence brings more daily revenue and visibility. It makes you searchable, viable, easily found and credible.
Microsoft’s commitment to cloud services adoption within the SME sector in Nigeria received a boost with the granting of $35,000 to the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies to support an independent study on the Gaps in Data Privacy and Security. The findings of this report would be released to the general public in the weeks ahead.
Has your company been involved in any specific SME engagement programme in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa? If yes, give us some insight into this.
•As part of the Microsoft 4Afrika initiative, our promise is to bring 1M SMEs online by 2016 across Africa, this will be made possible through our online portals, enablement for service providers and top app creators, through mentorship program, business development approach and affordable connectivity through TV white spaces.
•We are enabling service providers with the platform (portal) to provide online services on a freemium model to other SMEs – this happened across 9 main categories that SMEs highlighted as needed services (through roundtables and focus groups): Finance and Insurance, Accounting, legal, Marketing, administration, business services, business opportunities, technology and people.
•Building an SME community across Africa will definitely increase the intra- Africa trade level, and with the Cloud motion we are facilitating this movement to happen across countries between SMEs very easily.
• In Nigeria we have supported over 300 technology startups through our BizSpark program which provides free software and tools such as Visual Studio and Office. Likewise we have provided grants to Nigerian startups through the 4Afrika Innovation Grant, one of such beneficiaries is Gamsole – A mobile game production company creating Windows games, with downloads topping more than 9 million.