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| Africa Subsaharan | |
| In Africa, a New Middle-Income Consumerism | |
| 2008-09-02 | |
| KAMPALA, Uganda -- Meet Denis Ruharo, an entrepreneur with a master's degree, a man who carries a BlackBerry and two Nokia cellphones, buys organic greens at a grocery store and sometimes does business over a cold Nile beer at a club called Silk. "I have the mortgage and home improvement," he said, glancing at the budget he and his wife keep on their computer. "The car, carwash and parking tickets. Entertainment -- cable TV, two movies a month. The health club. Then normally we vacation twice a year. Last time it was Nairobi." "What else," he said, scrolling down on his Mac PowerBook. "Newspapers, charity, clothes, books and CDs . . . " In a region more often associated with grinding poverty, Ruharo is part of a modestly growing segment of sub-Saharan Africa -- upwardly mobile, low- to middle-income consumers. The group includes working Africans who make as little as $200 a month, a paltry sum by Western standards, yet hardly the $1 or so a day in earnings that describe life for about half the continent's population. Perhaps a third of all Africans, or 300 million people, fall into a middle category -- people struggling to put their kids through school and pay rent, but able to buy a cellphone or DVD once in a while. Their buying power is evident around Kampala, a green and hilly city where iron-sheet homes are interspersed with high-rise condos, streets are crowded with bikes and Japanese sedans, and the city's newest mall, Oasis, is under construction. It will be anchored by what amounts to sub-Saharan Africa's first Target-style superstore chain, Nakumatt, which sells corn flour, aromatherapy bath salts and nearly everything else. The company is opening two other superstores here, plus two in Rwanda, three in Tanzania and 11 in Kenya, where it began as a trading firm in the 1960s. "It's psychological -- people want upward movement," said Thiagarajan Ramamurthy, Nakumatt's operations director. "The appetite is increasing -- the 14-inch TV became a 21-inch. The 21 became a 29 and the 29 became plasma. It's an aspiration."
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| Posted by:Fred |