3 LOW COST BUSINESS IDEAS FOR AFRICA

There’s no denying it : Africa is the place to be to start a business! Risk taking entrepreneurs, companies and businesses are rushing onto the continent to grab opportunities before they ran out. The problem ? It’s that many rush in without being ready the face the challenges the continent harbors, basic challenges like in terms of knowledge of the area, finding trust worthy contractors and many more. 
That’s when YOU come in! The real business here is to create ideas and services that will facilitate the landing on the continent for these entrepreneurs and businesses. 
So here it is, just for hungry for business ventures: 3 start-up ideas that can be done with a little time and a little money !
  1. Generate city guides
If an entrepreneur or business wants to relocate to Africa, it needs to know it’s way around the city it intends to start or implant a business. City guides are basically non existent in Africa at the moment. Providing trusted guides to these businesses and entrepreneurs is a sure way to generate revenue.
The solution ?
Produce a guide for the city you live in packed with detail and fresh information that cannot be found elsewhere. Put on the places that only locals know, make it authentic. It should be updated on a weekly basis and dig deep in detail.
You can start by blogging about your city for example and sell the guides you create as PDF documents to entrepreneurs and business people.
Go further by expanding into other cities, getting in touch with popular locals and journalists that can help you establish an authentic name for yourself.
Eventually people will come to you as an area consultant.
    1. Offer Market data
Data is practically impossible to come by in Africa. Today, expensive European consultants are hired by companies to conduct research on behalf of clients who want to come to the continent.
The solution ?
The idea here is simply to create a site as a portal for publishing research data about Africa. You can start by gathering and sorting out research already done by other companies and published on the web. Create a website that is a portal that will redirect people to where this information can be found.

You will need to get permission to publish bits of the research on your site, generally companies want to sell their reports and will like that you will create traffic on their site.
 Make sure you find quality information…that will establish your credibility. The business will be based on sponsored ads on the website once your traffic builds up.
If you build up enough expertise you can bypass European consultancy agencies !
    1. Create contractor/professional listings
Many who want to do business in Africa face the problem of finding trustworthy partners on the grounds. Be it contractors or professionals, companies spend a lot of time going through many potential partners to look for one they can trust. Even when they find one they think they can trust they may be in for a nasty surprise.
The solution ? 
This simply involves setting up a list of contractors/professionals in your city or country in various fields and industries. Give them a rating based on their reputation in the country on the website. The best way to get an authentic and trustworthy list is to deal with locals. Find out as much information about these contractors, if they have been involved in corruptions or rather are respected local business men or women.
This is about authentic people, just one bad person on your list could destroy the integrity of your business. The list should have professionals that can be trusted a 100 percent by outsiders !
The business model would involve publishing an updated list quarterly as a digital document and at a fixed price or you can run a freemium model where parts of the lists are free online but you pay for the full list.

There you go! Three small ventures that could bring in big bucks! 

Questions? email the inspire team: inspireafrika@inspireafrika.com

images: courtesy of Google images

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