A few days ago, I shared a story on LinkedIn that came out of an afternoon playing golf at Karen Country Club in Nairobi. A friend and potential business partner had invited me for a round, and somewhere between the pars, the birdies and more than a few double and triple bogeys, we got talking about business in Africa.
I told him about a friend who had left the UK after Covid to set up a haulage business in Nigeria. He wanted to build the company properly. He offered his drivers health and life insurance, paid sick leave and paid annual leave. In his mind, these were sensible business decisions. Better conditions would help him attract and keep good people, build loyalty and create a more professional organisation.
Then something unexpected happened. The drivers did not necessarily see an entrepreneur investing in his workforce. They saw someone who must have so much money that he could afford to give all of this away.
My golf partner put it neatly: “They saw him as an NGO.”
I laughed at the time, but it raised a question for me.
It was not a criticism of NGOs. Their work is important, particularly where public systems are weak and humanitarian organisations may be the only institutions able to provide protection, healthcare, food or education. The question is what happens when that becomes the main way people encounter outsiders who bring resources into a community.
If the most visible external institutions exist to provide services, grants and assistance, that may gradually shape what people expect outside money to look like. And what happens when the next outsider arrives with capital and a completely different purpose?
A business is not a grant.
An investor expects a return. An entrepreneur is taking a risk. A company has to earn revenue, manage costs, pay its people and survive without someone continually putting money into it. Yet that distinction is not always obvious in places where the language and experience of aid have been part of the economic landscape for many years.
I should be careful about how much one story can carry. The drivers’ reaction may have had other roots. Previous employers may have offered very little, or the trust that any new employer has to earn may simply have been slow to arrive. I cannot say which.
But the aid explanation deserves attention, because capital does not arrive in a vacuum. It arrives in places with histories, and those histories shape how people read institutions, employers, governments, foreigners and money itself.
Take employment conditions.
In one setting, health insurance and paid leave are basic parts of a decent job. In another, where such benefits are uncommon, they can look extraordinary.
The employer thinks: I am trying to build a good company.
The employee may think: Why is this person giving me so much?
That difference is not necessarily about generosity. It is about context, and context is built from experience. People judge something new against what they have already seen from previous employers, from governments, and from donors, NGOs and other outsiders.
This matters for anyone putting capital to work across African markets. An entrepreneur may arrive thinking about productivity, jobs and return on investment, while the people meeting that entrepreneur may be working from a very different frame of reference.
If most of their earlier dealings with outsiders involved projects and benefits provided to communities, a private company offering something valuable can easily be read the same way.
The investor is thinking about building a business. The community may be wondering what the investor is going to give. That is not necessarily cynicism. It may simply be the logic that experience created.
There is a risk on the other side too. An entrepreneur who finds that decent employment standards are being read as generosity may be tempted to lower them.
I think that would be the wrong response. Responsibility should not shrink because it is unfamiliar. A business can pay people fairly, offer decent conditions and treat employees with dignity and still be understood as a business. That does require a clearer conversation about what a business is there to do.
Good employment practices are not charity. They are part of building a productive organisation.
A driver who is healthy, secure and treated with respect is not simply receiving a benefit. The employer is investing in the stability of the company.
A firm that develops its workers is not giving value away. It is building capability.
An investor who improves infrastructure is not necessarily being philanthropic. They may be creating the conditions the investment itself needs in order to succeed.
Responsible business and commercial discipline can sit together. I would argue that this is central to the move from aid dependency towards investment, enterprise and economic agency.
Investment has to be understood on its own terms. It is not aid with a different logo.
At the same time, investors are entering environments shaped by decades of experience with governments, donors and NGOs. They cannot assume their intentions will automatically be understood in the way they intended them.
Good intentions are not enough, and neither is capital.
You need to understand the story people already carry about what your presence means.
My friend’s experience with his drivers was a small example, but it shows how capital behaves when it enters a place. It brings more than money. It enters an existing set of expectations, relationships and memories.
Sometimes those help the business. Sometimes they create misunderstandings.
The task for entrepreneurs is not to reject those expectations, but to understand where they came from and then build something people can recognise on its own terms.
For those of us working around development, investment and economic transformation, there is a useful question to keep asking:
When funding ends and a business begins, can people see the difference?
For businesses trying to build something lasting, that may be an important question.
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Dr. Wale Osofisan, PhD, is a seasoned governance strategist and policy analyst with over 23 years of experience advancing African-led, evidence-based solutions to political transitions, humanitarian crises and development challenges.
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