Alibaba’s Jack Ma hopes to empower entrepreneurs in Africa
- The founder of Alibaba said efforts to help African entrepreneurs may help discover the next Jack Ma, Bill Gates or Warren Buffett
Jack Ma, founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, is looking to empower entrepreneurs in Africa so that they can help drive change in the world’s second largest continent.
“Entrepreneurs are the most important element to promote society,” said Ma, who spoke in public for the first time since retiring, at the Forbes Global CEO Conference on Tuesday in Singapore, where he received a lifetime achievement award.
“In Africa, we need three Es: E-government, to make the government transparent; entrepreneurs, make them heroes; and education, make the people know what they want and what they don’t want,” he said. “The thing is that entrepreneurship in Africa is so different … Most entrepreneurs in our countries, they always want to [start an] enterprise, they want to go for IPO. These people in Africa, they want to change Africa. They want to change their lives.”
In November last year, Rwanda became the first African nation to join the Alibaba-led electronic world trade platform (EWTP) initiative, following similar efforts in Southeast Asia, as the New York-listed company seeks to expand digital trade globally. Alibaba is the parent company of the South China Morning Post.
As part of that initiative, Alibaba pledged to help small and medium-sized enterprises in Rwanda sell their products, such as coffee beans, on its online marketplaces.
The EWTP platform was conceived by Ma as an electronic Silk Road to connect every country and give businesses the ability to sell anywhere in the world. The benefits of using EWTP hubs include speedy customs clearance, logistics support and minimal tariffs.
Alibaba’s move to open up free trade electronically comes amid the US-China trade war, which has seen both countries slap the other with billions of dollars in tariffs. Setting up EWTP hubs would benefit businesses using the EWTP both in China and around the world, by reducing barriers to commerce and offering Chinese companies more global trading opportunities.
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Ma said it would be a great honour “if we can help discover more Jack Ma, Bill Gates or Warren Buffett” in Africa. “This is what I want to do,” he added.
Ma, who stepped down as Alibaba’s executive chairman in September, has for years been the face of the company since he founded it together with 17 others in his Hangzhou flat in 1999.
At 55, Ma is the first leader from China’s major internet companies to step away from the technology empire he built in a country where founders are inclined to wield a tight grip over their companies well into their eighties in some cases.
His successor is Daniel Zhang Yong, Alibaba’s chief executive, who is credited as the driving force behind the company’s annual Singles’ Day shopping extravaganza and its “new retail” efforts, such as its Freshippo supermarket chain that combines online and offline shopping experiences for consumers.
Ma has plans to focus on philanthropic efforts and education, which is an area close to his heart because of his previous occupation as an English teacher in Hangzhou.
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“I have built up a kindergarten, a middle school, and I’ve been working with teachers in the rural areas [In China] for five years,” said Ma at the event in Singapore. “But I need another year to think it through, visit more countries, more school, more teachers.”
In the classroom, you learn about knowledge, but life is about experience,” he said. “One other very important thing in society today: the internet, it’s a mobile classroom. [How] the kids are getting knowledge is so different from the way we did.”
Over the past year, Ma has travelled around the world to speak in various conferences, including to promote technology for good in Paris and support the empowerment of women globally. He has also been leading initiatives closer to home, from planting trees in the Gobi desert to fight desertification to pledging enormous sums of money to support women’s soccer in China.
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