At the Minority Development Business Agency, My National Director - Ron Langston and I

At the Minority Development Business Agency, my national director - Ron Langston and I really saw an opportunity to try address the issue of the Diaspora. How do you get more African Americans engaged in doing business in Africa, and even beyond that, how do you get the US minority community more engaged in doing business worldwide. Now there's a lot of minority groups that we find that already have very close ties to their home markets - Asians, Latin Americans - but because of historical reasons African Americans typically don't have the same ties to Africa, and we're trying to work on finding ways to develop more interest and to develop stronger business to business linkages between not just African Americans, but the US minority community and Africa. We're the only federal agency that really focuses in on minority business development, that's our mandate. It's not small or large businesses; it's just the US minority business community. Our goal is to try to grow US minority businesses from small to large so that we can really be players at the global table as many of those in the majority are. My first point on Doing Business in America is it's just like any other market. You've got to do your homework. I mean the US is many markets within one market, just like Africa is. There's the US minority market and that in itself is broken down into many distinct sub-divisions. The first point is - Identify the need, do your market research. Find out what products there is a demand in the United States, and in that where is the demand. It might be different in Detroit than it is in Chicago or Los Angeles. So, its just like starting anything else, and I'm probably telling you guys something that you already know, but there are some US government tools that you can use even though a lot of folks here aren't US citizens and that are free on the internet that the US Department of Commerce provides to help do market research. You can do some of that research at - it's really geared towards US people looking to export abroad, but there's a lot of information about the US market on that website as well. There's a lot of information about almost every country around the world that the US has normal trade relations with.

Also, brand your product. As we were just discussing, demand really can be created. There are some amazing African products out there. What's traditionally happened is, the coffee grown in Uganda gets sold to the French, the French come in and take the coffee and then they rename it French Roast and nobody actually knows that that coffee was actually grown in Uganda. Now, hopefully through AGOA with the preferences and the import duties being held to zero for a significant number of products, there's an opportunity for Africa to sell directly into the US and to brand and to create a demand for the African product. There are a couple of stumbling blocks. One is financing. In the countries that I've visited in Africa, there's not a strong financing mechanism or banking system that supports financing small businesses like the SBA. I think several countries are looking at SBA and looking at the model that SBA has created to try and imitate that model as people realize that small business is really what fuels economies. It creates jobs. It's a great way to combat poverty and get people to hold a stake in their communities. A lot of the economies are really informal. There's bartering going on, but there's no way to go to a bank and take out a loan. One of the things the Minority Business Development Agency is doing, we're looking at a couple of test cases. For instance, we were just in Senegal and they have a bunch of local banks that are interested in looking into this concept of micro financing. What we're trying to do is put together an access to capital training seminar to work with a specialized group of banks that are interested in this, then we'll hand pick some companies, some folks with excellent business plans and work to develop a pilot program so that we can show the banks that this is not an undue risk. It can be done and it has to be done in Africa in order for people to really grow their businesses.

Finding a distributor. This is a tough nut to crack in the United States. You've got to be able to find a distributor for your products. One of the things I would offer to you is that the Minority Business Development Agency is really set up as a decentralized organization. Because we have significant amounts of the minority population outside of Washington, we have regional offices that are in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Dallas and Atlanta. Each of these areas also has district offices to reach out to places like Miami and Los Angeles - places that have significant numbers of minorities living there. What we're trying to do is work with those regional offices to try to find distributors for people in the area. If LA is the target market, then you can get in touch with our LA district director and they can help try to find a distributor. It's not just having the product; you have to find a way in here, and its certainly not easy. It's not easy for African Americans to find ways to distribute their products here in the US. So what we're trying to do at the Minority Business Development Agency is to start from the beginning, look at the basic problems of financing, teaching people who haven't necessarily had an entrepreneurial culture or know how to put together a business plan, how to focus on marketing and promotion. We do some technical assistance programs and we're looking at partnering with certain countries in Africa to try to develop programs to help that training. We're a really small agency; we're always strapped for cash. If it were up to my boss, we would go full boar on these training programs, but we just don't have the money so we're working with USAID and we've build a strategic partners approach to work with other agencies that are interested in development of the business sector in Africa.

Finally, I should say that - for the first time since Ron Brown was the Commerce secretary - we're going to have a minority business trade mission to Botswana and South Africa later on this year. It's to bring US minority-owned companies over to Southern Africa, but unlike the commercial service and other agencies, we are allowed to really look at two-way trade. The US Commercial Services really focus on US exports, whereas we see AGOA as more of a partnership. Its got to be attracting US investors to sub-Saharan Africa. We see a role in trying to help develop distribution networks. So we're really looking at business-to-business partnerships and all the various forms that it takes, and looking at ways to facilitate those links. We really feel that no matter what the policy makers decide to do in terms of how far they want to extend AGOA, the real promise and the real jewel is if we are able to us this opportunity to build business to business linkages. We're not going to say that we have all the answers, but what we're trying to do is break it down into pieces, looking at the issues and trying to develop partnerships to facilitate the growth of business between the US minority community and the sub-Saharan African community.

Thank you.