Empowering Africa's tomorrow, together

Around 2016’s divestment, Absa was faced with the challenge of fundamentally redesigning its identity and strategy. Our organization took time to rethink its core values and ways of doing business as an integrated pan-African organization. This is how Absa’s conception of Africanacity was born. Absa defines Africanacity as the distinctly African ability to get things done with tenacity, ingenuity, creativity, audacity, and positivity. With this in mind, developing Absa’s talent became a top priority of its cultural transformation to meet changing needs. So, Absa turned to IMD to shape its learning and development initiatives, targeting people at many levels of Absa’s organization. The resulting learning journeys included customized programs and corporate entrepreneurship projects enriched with coaching, mentoring, and career-development sessions. As program participants, we all applied our areas of expertise to collaborative intrapreneurship projects. Embodying innovation at speed, project work included concept testing and product prototyping – and, crucially, getting out of the office to engage with stakeholders. Each project had to meet a set of SMART criteria: that is, being Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Relevant, and Time-bound. We joined forces with Consumer Credit Risk (Neo Mubambe), Retail Digital Channels (Refilwe Seisa), and the People Functions (Montle Maseko) to take ‘Extending the Group-Savings Model in Botswana’ as our Enterprise Project during the Absa-IMD Learning journey, LEAP. It was conceived as an inclusive banking solution for Botswanans, but also as a solution that could be applied elsewhere in Africa. The project was supervised by Dr. Hischam El-Agamy, Director of IMD Learning Journeys. Putting group savings to work Group savings operate on a simple yet effective concept. Community members voluntarily come together to form a group and contribute a fixed amount of money regularly. These contributions create a shared pool of funds, which is then made available to members on a rotational basis or in times of need. Group savings rely on participants’ spirit of trust, cooperation, and financial discipline. When they work, they help; but there are risks to be heeded. For one thing, the pool of funds is limited by members’ contributions, which

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