Monthly Archives: June 2012

Urban Inflation Index: June 2012

The budget speech was read earlier this month and while the big news was about the tax authorities now targeting landlords (who have always been required to pay tax, but don’t), there’s also a draft Value Added Tax (VAT) bill that’s expected to lead to some price increases including of some food items. Here’s a  recap of the  2012 Kenya Budget Highlights (PDF) by financial firm Deloitte.

On to the index – comparing changes to March 2012, a year ago and three years ago.

Gotten Cheaper
 
Other food item: Sugar: A 2 kg. Mumias Sugar pack which is Kshs. 237, down from Kshs. 245 in March . It was 190 a year ago and 175 three years ago.

About the Same 

Foreign Exchange: 1 US$ equals Kshs. 84.25 compared to 83 in March. Many people expect the shilling will invariably drop again due to the current account deficit the country has. Last June, the dollar exchanged at 89 and three years ago it was at 78.

Communications: Cell phone rates are relatively unchanged with mobile operators just trying to get more usage from customers. This month Safaricom sent text messages encouraging more use of facebook, twitter,  and Buni.com  & imdb.com (where you can watch TV & movie clips ).

Beer/Entertainment: A bottle of Tusker beer is Kshs 180 ($2.2) (at a local pub), unchanged from three months ago. There have been no price wars despite the link new beer entrants on the market, and one newspaper wrote last week that, in order to  get more tax from beer, the government is going to adjust beer prices every three months.
Utilities:

Pre-paid electricity is about Kshs 2,500 per month which is unchanged from the last review.

LPG: Cooking gas supplies seem to have resumed stability for now, but at a price of about Kshs. 3,000 ($37)
   
More Expensive
 

Fuel: Petrol prices in Nairobi are Kshs 117.6 per litre (~$6.25 per gallon) compared to 111.6 in March and 114.9 in June. Three years ago, the price was 40% cheaper at Kshs 72.5 per litre. Niti Bhan advises that it’s important to also track the price of kerosene as that has a significant bearing on millions of households compared to petrol. Read her blog here and an interesting column that showed that cooking gas  LPG cooking gas is cheaper than kerosene (but requires a large cash investment, which is out of reach for many) 
Staple Food: A 2kg pack of (Unga) Maize flour, which is used to make Ugali that is eaten by a majority of Kenyans daily, costs Ks118, up from Kshs. 97  in March 2012. A year ago it was Kshs 130 and three years ago it was 92 per bag.

Guide to Madagascar

A guest post by  @Wanyama of Africa Knows – see their extensive Images of Madagascar collection.

The Malagasy currency is Ariary with $1 = MGA 2200

Getting There: Air Madagascar has the cheapest direct return flights at around $780. The only catch is that this flight operates on Fridays only. Kenya Airways offers the best options from Nairobi to Antananarivo with three flights weekly at around $900. Travel on other days drastically increases the price of the ticket by over 100% and some of the travel times for the three-hour flight can take 20 hours as you connect through other cities within and outside Africa.

Ivato International Airport in Tana is a small airport with an average of four landings and takeoffs per hour in the middle of the day. The airport has one restaurant and snack bar with a few small duty-free shops stocking souvenirs, chocolate, alcohol, tobacco, luggage, fragrance and clothing for sale.

Entry visas are offered at the airport in an attempt to boost the tourism numbers of Madagascar. The visa is usually free for visitors staying less than 30 days.  The process takes between 30 to 45 minutes as there are usually long lines of foreigners entering the country.

Getting Around: As is common in most airports, taxi drivers await passengers to take them to town. An average fare from Ivato International Airport to downtown Antananarivo is around MGA 40,000 or $19.

Most locals take the minibuses or “matatus” in Swahili. Most minivans can either seat 14 or 18 commuters. These mini buses are notorious for overloading passengers and a 14-seater van can at times carry 20 passengers.  Minibuses usually cost around 30 times cheaper than a taxi.

For foreigners, taxis are the regular mode of transportation. One needs to negotiate with the driver to determine both the price and if the driver is interested in going in your direction. Unlike most cities where a taxi will deliver a fare to any region of the city, taxi drivers in Tana (short of Antananarivo) will often refuse to take a fare if they feel it is “too far”.  It is important to negotiate the fare before boarding a taxi.

Antananarivo is pretty secure although with limited street lighting. Once during the day, I walked downtown taking photos and my friends insisted I be very careful with my camera as sometimes thieves would come about. I never felt threatened though or felt I was in danger of being robbed. Electricity is not that reliable in some areas of the city. Tana also has very few street lights.

Communications:   In Madagascar, you either speak French or Malagasy. Since I spoke neither, I concentrated on hanging out with people who spoke English. It was rather embarrassing when I attended meetings and needed a translator or someone who could understand English to get any message across. I have now vowed to learn French as soon as is possible.

In Madagascar, Kenya’s leading network Safaricom doesn’t work. The island doesn’t have any roaming arrangements with Safaricom. There are three main carriers: Telma which is the national carrier, Orange and Bharti Airtel.

I was fortunate to stay at a friend’s place and he had Blueline’s (a cable and internet service provider offering triple play services) home internet. The connection was pretty solid and up at all times. There were a number of cybercafes that I saw in town but didn’t get a chance to visit any. I attended two conferences and both Blueline and Orange had free wi-fi for attendees.

Shopping & Sight-seeing: Most tourists in Antananarivo visit the main market in downtown for their shopping. Spices are a national export and the markets are full of a wide variety of spices. Traders will offer you different spices and provide you with instructions on how to use them correctly. For souvenirs, tourist purchase stuffed imitation lemur dolls and sculptures of baobab trees.

Antananarivo is quite a picturesque city. Built on a hill and with the old-world French charm, the architecture and cobblestoned streets make for a wonderful discovery of a city that keeps offering more to the senses as often as possible. The streets are narrow and if you are on the hillside, every block offers a great view of downtown down below. It is a great city to walk as opposed to driving in.

Rice paddies also lie on the outskirt of the city and as you drive from the airport, you go through miles of these paddies. It is an interesting juxtaposition of the rural and urban settings.

From the air, the most surprising thing is the red rivers filled with topsoil eroded from the many slash-and-burn farms dotting the landscape. This is a land where traditional farming practices greatly affect the environment and the long-term viability of agriculture.

The whole city of Tana is a visual feast. Being an old French colony, the city has an old European feel about it. The city is built on a hill with a sign stating “Antananarivo” overlooking downtown similar to the famous Hollywood sign. Atop the hill sits the Queen’s Palace and a number of hotels and old French palaces that are accessed through narrow cobblestoned streets. Atop the hill is an impressive view of downtown Tana with the national stadium and a manmade lake with a sculpture of an angel in the foreground.

Odd Points: – In Madagascar, they have a drink with small amounts of alcohol that is made specifically for children. This early introduction to “happy hour” is called Fresh (Panache).
– Malagasy people aren’t aggressive in business. You can arrive at a store around closing time and the shopkeeper will rather close the shop than serve that last client. In the same manner, a taxi will let a fare go since “you aren’t going in the direction I am”.
– The International Madagascan Fair (FIM) was full of great-looking and well-dressed women who acted as brand hostesses. The whole fair felt like a competition of who had the most beautiful women as hostesses rather than how can we do business together.

Local legends: Being an island nation, it was interesting to note that Malagasy people believe some families come from mermaids.

Guide to Luanda

A guest post by @Justdes 
Getting There: Flights to Luanda cost between $900 – $1500 for economy seats on Ethiopian, South African (partnering with TAAG Angola), Emirates and Kenya Airways (who have direct flights between Nairobi and Luanda). Note – our application for visas were done through Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and these  should be done early as it might take a few weeks, throwing off your scheduled plans.
 
On Arrival:  I was lucky to have someone from our office pick me up from the airport, and  I experienced no hassle – although I’m told that people go through hell. My colleague was interrogated for two hours for no reason at all last time she travelled to Luanda. They also ask for your Yellow Fever certificate after your passport has been stamped and as you are on your way to baggage claim which is weird cause if there’s a problem what are they to do? 

Getting Around: Matatus (called Candongueiros) and personal cars. Fuel is about Kshs 60 shillings a litre so it’s pretty affordable in comparison to Kenya. The traffic is a nightmare though with only two main highways into the city centre where everyone works. The roads are great though, with three lanes on either side and no signs of potholes.
 
It is not safe to walk around on the street alone being a foreigner. You’re advised to always drive around or, better yet, be driven around due to traffic, safety and difficulty in parking.

Where to Stay:  The business hotel of choice is Trópico in the city centre and goes for $420 dollars a night excluding breakfast. However, I stayed at Talatona hotel, which was closer to the local office and much nicer/more contemporary at $570 a night inclusive of breakfast.
 

If you’re staying in a good hotel, you’re sure to not have power supply issues. But, the entire city is constantly under electricity cuts, and some residential areas have invested in their own power generators.
 
Dining: A regular lunch is about $30 while, it’s $70 MINIMUM for a normal dinner, and over $100 for a dinner at a medium-high restaurant. Had a Rancho for lunch which is a huge plate of food, with everything imaginable (& imported?) in it. Quite delicious…too much though – and that plate of food cost Kshs 2000. Also enjoyed an ice cold Cuca, a light local beer in a champagne glass, which tastes a lot like Sierra blonde and costs Kshs 400. I’d say you need over $150 per day to get around.
via    http://www.ydamba.com/imagens/pensador.jpg
Communications: I was not able to get Blackberry service so had no access to my email on phone. I bought a local line for $9 and airtime worth $45 which I used during my four day stay there with constant access to data. Wi-Fi was  also available at the hotel (Talatona – but was a nuisance to connect to….password after password, that I didn’t even bother) and also available at our local office and was pretty fast.

There is no local English newspaper, and the National language is Portuguese but there are a few local dialects. Portugese is spoken everywhere and you’ll be lucky to find a little English spoken for business. There is lots of influence from immigrants from Portugal, but you can hardly get by in restaurants / other social places without a translator. 

Shopping & Sight-Seeing: Common is Luanda Bay, Luanda’s Islands main shopping center, called Belas Shopping Center in Talatona. A typical take home item would be wood carved masks or a wood “Angolan thinking man” carving.

Is Social Media a Career?

There have been a few jobs advertised of late for social media positions including at diverse companies like the Kenya Airports Authority, Nation Media Group and now Squad Digital (for Rwanda). 

But there’s more to these jobs than just being on Facebook or Twitter, and ultimately they are about communications – being aware & monitoring of what’s being said or written, then communicating a company position to the public, communicating product features, changes  & news, or communicating with customers in customer service – and to communicate properly, entails an understanding of media, marketing, campaigns, product cycles, consumer behaviour etc. This  Citizen news piece gives a behind the scenes look at the currently widely-acknowledged corporate leader in social media engagement – Safaricom.
Not all companies are ready for social media, nor should they all be online – and while the current mediums are blogs, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, they may next be on others such as G+, Whive or Mxit, having come from engaging on company websites and email. But ultimately, it’s about communications, not social media, and as @kaboro said – if all you know is Facebook & twitter, you’ll be out of a job before long.

Financial Revenge of the Mainstream

Have you ever navigated a bank or financial site, and tried to complete a transaction or upload a file, but found an inexplicable error? Even after re-checking all the fields, character formats, cell alignments, password & field lengths, it still does not work.  It might even be a matter of uploading a simple text file into the system and with all the proper steps followed, or even cutting & pasting from the bank’s sample file, it still won’t upload or allow you to move to the  level? 
The answer to this could be that you’re using a Mac computer or a Firefox  or other browser – and if you try the same process using a PC and/or Internet Explorer browser,  you might find that the problem is fixed, if there ever was one. 

Sometimes the site admins are aware of these quirks, and advise users to try and complete transactions using PC’s or by running Internet Explorer, while others may not be aware – even as platforms other than Windows and Internet Explorer are now just as common. Anyway, always have a PC nearby or run down to the secure cyber cafe instead of trying over and over,  and wasting a few needless and frustrating hours.