From South Africa, our fundraising roadshow took us to Luanda, Angola. Luanda is definitely one of Africa’s s best kept tourism and business destination secrets. From pristine beaches, to escarpment looking things that meet the ocean, to food and music, to the beautiful Kwanza river and it’s luscious greens, to a clean city and warm people – it certainly is a place to be for both business and pleasure.
Whilst in Luanda we had the pleasure of facilitating a workshop on the trade opportunities in the SADC region and touched on the subject of imports, exports and tariffs. It was an absolute honour to be supported with presentations by the Ambassadors in Angola of both my home countries – Zambia and South Africa.
You know its an important conversation when what was meant to be a small event of max 50 ended up getting so much demand that we had to change venues to accommodate more people and we still ended up with people standing in the back. It was well attended by industry giants, representatives from the embassies of Namibia and Zimbabwe; Angola ministry of commerce and industry; and Angolan parliament.
We were honoured to be able to showcase some products from some of our portfolio companies from South Africa at the event and they both received amazing reviews and sold out.
Special thanks to the hosts – Africa Business Focus for putting together an amazing.
We also had the pleasure of being hosted on tworadio programs at Rádio Nacional de Angola alongside the director at ministry of commerce and some key local economists and consultants to talk about SADC regional intergration and opportunities and challenged in the region as well as a TV interview onour roadshow and what it meant for women entrepreneurs in Angola.
And finally a must in every place we travel to is to enjoy local food and beverages. On this trip there was food galore and the Mercado axi Luanda (Axi Luanda market) event did not disappoint on its promise of being the gastronomic festival of the city for 4 solid days . Special thanks to my friend Micaela for inviting me and doing such a stellar job of putting the market together with such a small team.
All in all, it feels like SADC is definitely open for business
