Kenyan Young Turk scores another first in global consulting

• Alliance alumnus tipped to head top advisory firm

James Mwangi, 33, has joined the ranks of young Kenyan professionals taking over the leadership of major businesses and organisations.

Last week, Dalberg Global Advisors, a development consulting firm with offices in Nairobi, Johannesburg, Mumbai, New York, Washington DC, Geneva, Santiago, San Franscisco, and Copenhagen, announced that Mr Mwangi was taking over as its Group Managing Partner to steer the firm to its next stage of growth globally.

As Mr Mwangi tells Saturday Nation section editor MICHAEL OMONDI, it has been an exciting journey moving from a global managing consulting giant to help bring a successful start-up off the ground out of Africa.

As he takes over the corner office, he thinks that the dialogue around development and the role of consultants is changing quickly. He hopes to be the game changer.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your involvement with Dalberg Global Advisors in Africa, and how you moved from McKinsey, one of the most recognised brands in management consulting, to a start-up shop on the continent? What is the idea behind the founding of Dalberg?

I first decided to get into management consulting right after finishing my undergraduate studies at Harvard University. At that time, I was fairly sure that I wanted to work in some sort of development organisation, but I felt that I needed to build some skills and familiarity with the private sector.

McKinsey, with its reputation and track record, therefore made a lot of sense as a place to start my career. While there, I quickly learnt that I enjoyed the challenge of developing original analysis and the excitement of debating different ideas with my colleagues as we worked towards recommendations.

What I was lacking was a sense of passion for some of the questions we were answering, which seemed very far removed from the reality I had grown up with, and so I began to reach out to development organisations, and businesses working in Africa, even though I feared that I would miss the consulting approach.

A colleague then put me in touch with Dalberg’s founder, who had also left McKinsey looking to do work in development, and was setting up a firm that would combine rigorous private sector analytical tools with a commitment to only doing work that positively impacted development.

At the time, it seemed like a dream come true and I jumped at the opportunity without really thinking about how hard it would be to adjust from being in a massive global firm where every system and process was in place, to being in a start-up where we still did not even have office space.

Fortunately, we were able to get past the first few challenging years, and managed to attract a lot of likeminded people who wanted to work at a firm that really focused on the issues facing developing countries.

By 2006, the New York office was stable and established, and we had successfully set up shop in several other US and European locations. I had always felt that the long term goal for me would be to work in Africa, and so I approached my colleagues with the idea of moving to set up offices on the continent. They agreed, and so after spending five years helping build a start-up in New York, I found myself starting from scratch with two new colleagues and an empty office.

How is the firm positioned now in Africa, vis-à-vis traditional global management consulting firms operating on the continent, and what kind of projects have you been handling?

We have been quite successful at growing the firm across Africa and now have thriving teams in Johannesburg, Nairobi and Dakar.

We have actually been surprised by how few consulting firms have more than one or two offices on the continent. Those that do, typically act as very separate operations in each country whereas we are very much managed as a single integrated team. As a result, we are often one of the few firms that can offer a fully global perspective to our clients.

Today, our work in Africa covers a number of categories and has had us deploying teams to almost 30 countries on the continent. We provide a lot of advice on organisational reforms and strategies for governments and international organisations such as the UN and African Development Bank.

We also work with investors and companies interested in opportunities on the continent, where we often are one of the few firms that can provide true knowledge of market conditions, potential partners and appropriate strategies.

I think there is an interesting change happening where development organisations are realising that the private sector is the key to transforming Africa, while companies are also realising that the biggest opportunities will be found in addressing the types of needs that were typically considered the responsibility of the public sector.