From Conflict to Compliance: Building Safer Business Systems in Africa
Africa presents unprecedented opportunities for investors and businesses, yet understanding the continent’s risk landscape requires nuanced, on-the-ground expertise. In this inaugural episode of Sicuro Conversations, we explore the journey from conflict to compliance with leading experts in peace-building and governance.
Join Sheila Kamande, communications expert with over 20 years in media and risk management, as she sits down with Dr. Lin Sambili, specialist in sports for development and peace, and Katra Sambili, governance expert across Africa. Together, they unpack the reality behind risk perceptions, discuss strategies for successful market entry, and reveal why physical presence and local partnerships are essential for thriving in African markets.
Key Topics Covered:
- Understanding Africa's true risk landscape versus perception
- Dominant conflict patterns and their business implications
- The role of digital infrastructure in reducing risk premiums
- How private sector can contribute to peace-building
- Practical strategies for navigating institutional fragility
- Why local expertise matters for business success
Full Transcript:
Sheila Kamande: Welcome to Sicuro Group Africa. My name is Sheila Kamande and I’m a communications expert with over two decades of experience in media and risk management. This is the first of our Sicuro conversations here at our Nairobi office. In this episode, we are discussing the journey from conflict to compliance and what that means in our African context. Our guests today are Dr. Lin Sambili, a peace and conflict resolution expert, and Katra Sambili, an expert in governance across Africa.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Katra Sambili: Thank you, Sheila. I’m really excited to be here and it’s a privilege to kick off this series of Sicuro dialogues. I’ve had a checkered career as you know. I’ve worked in public sector, government, for the African Union, the United Nations, and currently I serve a family office based out of London. In each of these organizations, I have observed how Africa is perceived through the prism of risk and fragility. I’m really excited to have this conversation today and to kick off what I know will be a very impactful, inspiring, and illuminating series. Thank you for having me.
Sheila: Thank you. So perhaps we can start with what you, in your own views, say the temperature of risk in Africa and especially Sub-Saharan Africa is. Where are we at the moment? Where are we in your own fields and experiences right now?
Katra: It’s a great question. I think it was President Adesina, the outgoing president of the African Development Bank, who said that Africa suffers a risk premium. It is three to four times more expensive for Africa to borrow than any other region in the world. Ironically, we have the lowest default rate in the world as far as infrastructural investment and repayment is concerned. For me, that speaks to the risk in perception holding the fort rather than reality. The reality is that we’re the lowest defaulters in the world, but the perception is that we’re the most risky region in the world to invest in.
How does risk translate in everyday life? Risk translates when you have bottlenecks to service delivery, when systems are fragile and cater to a few while failing many. How do we adjust for that? You have to raise awareness about the fragility of our systems. Encourage public institutions to be more strategic and anticipatory in their outlook rather than reactive. They need to anticipate and solve for public problems rather than be reactive to them.
I’ve had the opportunity to travel around Africa and observe how this anticipatory stance solves for problems before they even emerge. If you talk about the Republic of Rwanda, for instance, two months ago I had the opportunity to attend a meeting hosted by the minister for ICT and public service delivery in Rwanda. They took us on a tour of their system, Irembo, which digitized the entire public sector and facilitates the ease of doing business in Rwanda. An investor comes in and instead of being subjected to an entire rigmarole of applications, they just go to one place—that one-stop center is the Rwanda Development Board, and all the data and information they need sits in one house.
Who wouldn’t want to work in such a country instead of going from building to building, looking for connections? “I need a guy for a passport, I need a guy for a birth certificate”—in fact, this morning I’m dealing with birth certificate issues. We need systems at work and service delivery that has no bottlenecks, that is dealing with risk at the grassroots level and ensuring that we have a society that serves the people it’s meant to serve.
Sheila: Wonderful. What about you, Dr. Lin? What would you say is the current risk temperature or landscape at the moment?
Dr. Lin: Thank you, Sheila. I’ll just dovetail into Katra’s response because I think you’re giving very practical examples. We’re doing a pulse check of the continent, or let’s even scale it down to the young person and the youth’s voice. There is a hyper-awareness and a feeling of desensitization to the government. Number one, you have at a global scale geopolitical realignment, flagged off by the US government, for example. When you have conversations that happened around stepping away from aid programs, there’s that global crisis and what that cascades in my sector, for example, when it comes to working with young people in sports for preventing violent extremism.
You have that gap in funding and that gap in communication, and that flow decreases trust. So that’s one key pulse problem. We have young people who are thinking “what is my role?” There’s this youth wait that’s continuing. It’s a very clear theme where you’re waiting to graduate, and from graduating you’re waiting to find opportunities. You’ll have extremist groups using that opportunity to draw in young people who may not have access to opportunities that they should rightfully have access to, engaging them in conflict and increasing risk. That polarizes the society. You have this amplified feeling of “us versus them” and an isolation that’s starting from the global mega trend coming into the African continent and into the national level.
You have that cultural fluidity as well. Young people feeling, mass protests—we’ve seen that not just in-country but across the region as well. I would say that it is a solid amber, teetering on red, but there are things that we can do to claw it back, to rebuild trust where it’s needed. Those are some of the solutions that we’re implementing to intervene before it erupts.
Sheila: Yeah. I would say from a private sector perspective and as Sicuro Group, what we try to get our clients and potential clients to do is always, as you said is happening in Rwanda, to always be proactive in handling risk—not as just a department, not as an afterthought. It should be in the very fabric of setting up your business here. We can no longer ignore Africa, risky as it is. We cannot ignore Africa. So thank you very much for that.
When we look at the dominant conflict patterns across Africa and across the region, what would you say those are?
Dr. Lin: Number one, I would say there is a lot of intrastate conflicts and fragmentation. What do I mean by that? In most African societies, the conflict is happening within rather than between states. Within states you have that polarity, that fragmentation, that tension—whether it’s between the political class and the young people, you have this feeling of “us versus them.” That is exemplified in Sudan, for example. There is the war between the Sudanese armed forces and the Rapid Support Forces, and that’s within the state.
You have to ask yourself what is making this porous? What is causing these conflicts within states? What is sparking conflict? I think some of the things causing that is the porosity of borders. You have different viewpoints and ideologies coming into the state. You have tensions within the society and communities feeling left out, that the solutions are not deeply rooted and locally contextualized.
Nigeria is another one we can’t forget. We have these conflicts that span across the regions—you have Boko Haram within the states. It’s political, it’s ideological, and it’s even economical. These are some of the dominant patterns. It doesn’t just cut across ideology. Some people are in conflict and tension because of economics, because of youth wait, feeling disenfranchised.
Number two, I would say as a dominant pattern that I believe is there and rising is the rise of jihadist and Islamist insurgencies. What are we seeing, for example, when it comes to that? You’ve got the rise in influences in Mozambique with Cabo Delgado. You have ISIS who have been growing in numbers and in amplified messaging, not only from the African region but also traveling—you have recruits coming from across the world, even from the global north into the global south. There’s that change in the landscape in dominant patterns. Of course, al-Shabaab as well, with the porosity of borders between Somalia and Kenya. That is also something I see as a dominant pattern.
The third, as you bring it close to home at the national level, is ethnic and communal violence. What’s driving that? You’re looking at resource scarcity. There isn’t enough to go around. You have conversations around leadership tenure, and that’s sparking a lot of fear around resources. What’s causing this dominant pattern? What’s making it arise? You have political exclusion and economic exclusion and marginalization.
You have young people—in my case and in research I’ve done—who have felt historically marginalized because of their identity. You’re in this in-between status of “I am Kenyan but I am not. I don’t have an identity card and that leaves me on the margins of society quite literally. I can’t access opportunities. I’m socially cut off. My mobility is limited.”
I’ll give you a real-life example. When I was doing my PhD research, I had the opportunity to travel as far as Lamu and as far as Kiunga. Kiunga is close to the border—basically on the border—and it speaks to that porosity. You’ve had communities that are hyper-aware of the exclusion, and you had young people say things like “for me to even apply for an identity card, I must see the chief, I must sit under a tree with the chief, with the police constable, with everyone to check my identity and my lineage. But because of how far removed I am from Nairobi, from central government, I am limited.” Therefore, that is used as a potential catchment for conflict and for engagement in violence, from radicalization into extremism.
Those are some of the factors that you see: polarized states, political challenges that’s not just within the African continent, that’s across the world. There is a critical rise in nationalism and xenophobia. There’s this feeling of “us versus them,” black versus white. Racism is rife across the world and we’re seeing that. I would say that ethnic and communal violence is there at a micro level, but it’s also amplified at the macro level. These conversations are mirroring each other, and I think social media and disinformation is really promoting that.
The final one I’d say really is how that intensifies competition and climate change. I’m not just putting that as a tokenist response because everybody’s saying climate change. It’s a real dominant pattern of conflict, whether it’s between animals and humans or humans and animals. This is a real issue because the rise in global warming and the displacement of communities and persons has led to this tension. It’s one that we have to keep an eye on, especially when it comes to risk. You can’t ignore it and you have to contextualize it.
Sheila: I’m sure like when you talk about climate change, if climate change has led to rivers drying up, that’s a real issue in societies getting into conflict with one another. Katra, I do have a question about fragility of states and where that has left us—fragility that has been brought about by politics and what that means for different states and risk across Africa.
Katra: Thank you, Sheila. Building upon what Dr. Lin said, the fragility of states is about the institutions that have been structurally weakened—weakened by underinvestment, weakened by externally imposed reforms, weakened by legacies that don’t belong to us. This administrative structure that she referred to—that poor young person in Kiunga having to look for the chief, the sub-chief, maybe the area county commissioner, then the regional commissioner. All these people are required to verify this person’s identity, and that delays the period within which this person can access the opportunities that an ID is the entry point for.
Until we solve for our infrastructural gaps in terms of public service delivery, until we solve for a reality whereby Africa is the youngest continent in the world—by 2050, one in four people will be African. That’s counting all white people in the world, all Asians—one in four is a black person. What kind of systems are we setting up to factor for a world in which Africa is a quarter of the world’s population? How are we equipping our young men and women so that they are future-proofed in their skills, in their ability to integrate and compete globally? Because we’re a quarter of the world.
Now in the advent of AI, AI is everywhere, but the digital divide still exists. We had a conversation with the chief financial services officer of Safaricom and she said it’s gotten to a point where only 40% of Kenyans have access to smartphones. So Safaricom had to reach within itself and say “we have this reach and power within our country.” They set up an assembly plant for smartphones which are affordable and which can facilitate the entry into market of the 60% that is currently excluded. Everyone can have a smartphone and we move from having basic phones to smartphones and can engage with the global economy.
We have to create not just physical infrastructure but also digital infrastructure that enables Africa’s competitiveness and lowers our risk perception. We don’t want investors saying “Oh, there’s no internet in Africa. I can’t reach my clients. I can’t track my goods.” That is not necessarily true. As I said in the beginning, the perception of risk is so great that it shadows the facts.
When we talk about fragile systems, we have to understand that there’s an erosion of trust between state and society. How do we rebuild trust? How many times have you been where Kenyans just arrive at a place where we trust that the system will work because it has been announced that the system will work? That can only happen if we invest in our institutions, if we invest in our public service delivery mechanisms, if we invest in our communities and empower them and include them so that there isn’t a disadvantage. There are no geographical disadvantages or advantages from the center.
This is a colonial legacy that exists. Even Tom Mboya talked about it in 1965 when he wrote that paper about how development as a result of Nairobi being the hub and the seat of power meant regions suffered. There were eight provinces at that point in time. Because Nairobi was a center, the people who lived in and around Nairobi had a leg up on everyone else. If the railway for whatever reason did not pass by your village, you were structurally disadvantaged. The path dependence that has come about as a result of that endures to this day. The region that my sister and I come from became a backwater immediately because the railway did not pass through there.
What is the railway today? The railway is resources. The railway is inclusion. The railway is infrastructural investment. All these factor into contributing to Africa’s attractiveness and the lowering of the risk perception and that risk premium for our society.
Sheila: Wonderful. Thank you. You earlier mentioned Rwanda’s Irembo system, their one-stop shop for setting up businesses in Rwanda. I think we have a similar system here in Kenya, Huduma Center. What would you say for businesses wanting to set up here? How do they navigate? We’ve talked about the dominant patterns of conflict, we’ve also talked about the fragility. What weakens such systems which the government has already gone ahead and placed for the citizens and also incoming investors? How do they navigate that? Is there hope for businesses and institutions and governments to continue doing business and thriving in the face of such systems which have been weakened?
Katra: Absolutely. Absolutely. Let me take that and say that to all investors, to anyone interested in Africa: don’t go on Instagram and think you’ve arrived in Africa. Don’t go on TikTok and think you’ve arrived in Africa. Africa is so advanced. All the infrastructural investment that has been made—we have expressways that work, we have airports that work, we have all international airlines flying here. Every day there’s a British Airways flight leaving Nairobi every day at night and one coming in in the morning, every day without fail. Every day there are I think four or five flights a week from Emirates. Qatar flies out of here. We have ports that are world class. We have infrastructure that is world class.
Please do not allow the perception of risk hinder you from engaging in what I know is a gold mine. But come here understanding that we as Kenyans, we as Africans, are alive to the fact that we have our place. We’ve earned our place at the table. In fact, our ancestors died for our place at the table. We respect them. Out of respect for them, we ask that you deal with us with dignity and respect and engage us as peers. This is a partnership. This is not a favor that you’re doing us. If anything, if that’s your perception and your posture, please don’t come here. We are not seeking pity. We want partnerships. We don’t want dynamics of old.
In talking about Huduma centers, there’s a Huduma center in every county in this country where you can get an identity card, a birth certificate, a death certificate. You can get all these services. It is just that perception of risk is so deadly and so dangerous, and we fight it with every fiber in our being. We resist it with every fiber in our being.
Africa is not the kind of place that you have a long-distance relationship with. This is not that kind of thing. You need to be here. Sit across the table. Listen to us. Let’s understand each other. Read our body language. If we don’t like something, clarify. If we like something, we will tell you. That’s what I would say. Don’t have a virtual engagement with Africa. You have to engage physically. You have to be here and meet the people and come with respect and an understanding that this is not the Africa of old. This is the 21st century Africa in which one in four people will be African.
Sheila: At Sicuro Group Africa, one of the things that we do very well is help our clients with intelligence-led advisory and that helps in understanding the context and understanding the communities at a very grassroots level. My question to you in your different organizations and where you have worked before and where you are now currently: what is the role of peace-building in the private sector’s risk strategy?
Katra: Thank you, Sheila. I really want to take this opportunity to congratulate the Sicuro group on the work that you do because one of the things that Sicuro group understands is that risk is nuanced. I may come into someone’s home and just because they have a Doberman does not mean that they have not taken the measures to keep that dog away from biting me or attacking me. Or I may come into a home where there is construction going on. What measures have these people taken to ensure my safety? Risk is nuanced.
What Sicuro group understands is one size does not fit all. This blanket perception of all of Africa being a landmine of risks is wrong. Africa is not a monolith. Africa is diverse. There are 54 countries. There are over 2,000 languages spoken in this continent alone. Imagine speaking just one and assuming that you’ve understood the whole. You’re so lost.
What we encourage investors coming in is to remain curious. Have what a wonderful professor at Harvard called Professor Ronald Heifetz said: have a sacred heart. The sacred heart is innocent and it’s curious. It doesn’t come in with cynicism dressed as realism. It doesn’t come in with arrogance dressed as facts. You have to remain curious about the culture in which you’re engaging. Allow them to speak. Allow them to share their insights. Take in and factor for their perspectives and their experience. That’s the only way you’ll succeed in this country.
Yes, you can ride rough road over people, but that’s only short-term. If you want to succeed in the long term, if you want to be here for the foreseeable future, Africa is a place to be. If you’re not in Africa, you’re missing out largely.
When you talk about peace-building and the role that private sector can play, my mentor, Her Excellency Nardos Bekele-Thomas, who is the first female CEO of the African Union Development Agency NEPAD, always says that you cannot have development without peace and you cannot have peace without development.
Dr. Lin talked about the time bomb that is youth that are not engaged, that are excluded, that are ripe—like fruit to fall off a tree—ripe for extremism and recruitment. I was so surprised to learn that a place that I considered paradise, Trinidad and Tobago, is the number one recruiting spot for ISIS in the Caribbean. When you think of Trinidad, you think of calypso, you think of carnival, you think of bake and shark, you think of the delicious food and the mangoes. You think of all those things—how we have romanticized the Caribbean.
That is not the Caribbean today because of the porous borders. People are swimming from Venezuela, seven kilometers away, for future opportunities to engage. Now the challenge about people who can swim: good people can swim, but bad people can also swim. Many bad people have swum into Trinidad. It is so bad that the government had to institute a curfew and a state of emergency. The last time you had state of emergency was when Kenya was fighting for independence, and when African countries were fighting for independence, because it had become ungovernable. People are getting shot in the streets. What was once a hub for tourism, the richest country in the Caribbean because they have oil reserves, is now one of the most dangerous countries in the world. That breaks my heart.
There can be no development without peace and there can be no peace without development. One of the things that I invite us to consider is how can private sector contribute to what Madame CEO calls the triple nexus. The triple nexus is about humanitarian assistance, development, and peace-building. What role does private sector play in that? I think they play that by contributing to the development of the countries that they are entering into. Their investments will create jobs, and there’s a ripple effect in the hiring of these young men and women and in the realization of their capacity and their potential and their engagement.
Sheila, private sector has a role to play. We welcome them. As I said, we have to integrate private and public sector. We have to integrate in Africa. We have not arrived at a place where we leave everything to government. No, no. Private sector, you have a very solid role to play. You have your turn at the wheel. Don’t abscond and lift your hands up and say “oh government, blah blah blah.” No. Roll up your sleeves. Get involved, get engaged. There’s no way. It is an effort that needs to be collaborative.
Sheila: Fantastic. What’s your take on that, Dr. Lin?
Dr. Lin: Wow. There’s the often-cited proverb: if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. If you’re landing on the continent, you have to respect the nuances of culture. You have to respect the people’s voice, the people’s opinions, and understand that it is not stagnant. It is ever-evolving.
I think that is—again, just to say congratulations to Sicuro group and to yourselves—that investment in the local expert. Because as we say, Kenya is different. It is not what you hear on the papers. It’s not what you hear on the news. It is: what is the local pulse? You are an organization and a company that has its ear and its heart to the ground. You are able to be agile. You’re able to respond. You’re able to say “actually let’s not move forward with that as part of the risk register. Let’s increase engagement with women and girls, for example.”
What are these nuances that I know you’re already engaging in? The gender nuances, the gender norms. What might work for men under a baraza in a tree will not work for women. If you’re trying to extract information and learn, it has to be a dignified engagement. It has to be dignified, time-sensitive, an opportunity to sit down and listen or walk and listen. Primarily, this is about listening.
Again, as Katra said, you cannot observe Africa from the phone. You have to come and engage with the local experts such as yourselves and bear in mind factors such as intersectionality and how that ties into gender and gender empowerment, how that ties into risk registers going down, how that ties into business, how that ties into how a mother will set up a business if they get investment from the private sector, for example. Where there’s peace and development, if there is investment for them, they will empower the entire community. How they go about that will be so contextualized, so different from Nakuru, from Mombasa—the responses you will get. You have to come with an open mind, and that’s something that you’ve done.
Other key factors to remember for the private sector when it comes to peace-building: instantly engaging in it will reap a return on investment. Partnerships are the way to go. Engaging in that mindset will allow you to have opportunities to listen, to ensure you’re not lost in translation. You’re not landing with solutions, but rather you’re willing to listen and learn. You’re willing to roll up your sleeves and engage with different populations and grow.
Katra: If I may add, many years ago in 2007, when the new administration had introduced the Constituency Development Fund as an intervention to the gaps in infrastructure and investment at grassroots, I carried out research on the impact of the passive presence and the active absence of women on the committees that decide where these funds go. My findings were that in constituencies where the member of parliament was a woman, the decisions around where those resources were allocated differed significantly from the constituencies where the member of parliament was a man.
Where the constituencies were led by a woman, the committees that were constituted to decide where the development priorities would be and where resources would be allocated factored for socio-economic challenges that people face. Those ones led by men—inadvertently, and that was the data, don’t hate me, it’s just what it is and I’m happy to provide that information—the women-led CDF committees were focused on solutions such as sanitation, water and sanitation like how do we build latrines and prevent cholera outbreaks, whereas the ones led by men were “how do we build walls?” It was all about projects that were high on visibility but very low on utility.
Those are the nuances that we’re talking about. You have to come in understanding that there are so many dynamics at play. The women may be present, but they’re passive. Or they may be absent, actively absent. How do you integrate those voices that are muted or those people that are absent from the conversations that determine where the resources go and where the investment is made?
Katra: If I may add, many years ago in 2007, when the new administration had introduced the Constituency Development Fund as an intervention to the gaps in infrastructure and investment at grassroots, I carried out research on the impact of the passive presence and the active absence of women on the committees that decide where these funds go. My findings were that in constituencies where the member of parliament was a woman, the decisions around where those resources were allocated differed significantly from the constituencies where the member of parliament was a man.
Where the constituencies were led by a woman, the committees that were constituted to decide where the development priorities would be and where resources would be allocated factored for socio-economic challenges that people face. Those ones led by men—inadvertently, and that was the data, don’t hate me, it’s just what it is and I’m happy to provide that information—the women-led CDF committees were focused on solutions such as sanitation, water and sanitation like how do we build latrines and prevent cholera outbreaks, whereas the ones led by men were “how do we build walls?” It was all about projects that were high on visibility but very low on utility.
Those are the nuances that we’re talking about. You have to come in understanding that there are so many dynamics at play. The women may be present, but they’re passive. Or they may be absent, actively absent. How do you integrate those voices that are muted or those people that are absent from the conversations that determine where the resources go and where the investment is made?
Sheila, thank you so much for having us. This has been—what I love about this is that we’ve had this discussion off-camera before, and to realize this being a three-women panel, I love that we are all very exposed to the risk landscape in Africa. We’ve worked and we are exposed to these risks, and we are working actively, not passively but actively, to be part of the solution of risk in Africa.
As part of wrapping up, one of the things that I’d want as a takeaway, even as we kick off these Sicuro conversations, is for institutions and for investors who are coming to Africa to take an active role in preparation and not just take data as it is, but what does that data translate on the ground. Thank you very much for being here with us. I really would love to continue this conversation another day, perhaps even on a broader aspect of what this means for us even as we continue with risk in Africa.
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