East Africa’s top business leaders meet

• Summit to seek ways of taking advantage of emerging markets

About 100 of East Africa’s top business leaders are to attend a regional summit at Fairmont Mt Kenya Safari Club in Nanyuki, to discuss ways of tapping into emerging opportunities in the region.

The meeting scheduled for November 17 to 20 will bring together CEOs of public and private companies from Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, and Uganda.

The forum, convened every two years, is organised under the East Africa Business Summit.

Citi Group, Deloitte, KPMG, Nation Media Group, PWC and TPS Serena are the co-conveners.

Opportunities

“This year, the summit will explore ways to navigate the numerous emerging opportunities in Africa. In particular, we want to understand how CEOs’ decisions about strategies and operating models shape changes in the business landscape,” Mr Josphat Mwaura, chairman of the Convenors’ Committee, said in Nairobi during the media launch of the forum.

Mr Mwaura is also the CEO and senior partner KPMG East Africa.

The theme will be ‘Innovation — A Catalyst for Accelerated Growth in East Africa.’

Among issues the forum has successfully lobbied for is the laying of the fibre optic cable infrastructure connecting the region with the rest of the world — move that has changed the business environment and opened up job opportunities in the region.

Other workable plans that have come out of the various previous summits were value addition in agriculture, states partnerships through concessionaires like the Rift Valley Railways and setting up Business Process Outsourcing.

Nation Media Group Editorial Director Joseph Odindo said plans for regional television stations and Pan African media are some of the projects that could be explored through the forum.