African talent was always there. The structure was not.

Five years on, I can put facts under that sentence rather than convictions.

A company with six roles and no marketing

On a mandate for a World Bank and IFC-XSML portfolio company, the starting org chart held six roles, all in general management, finance and operations. No marketing function, no commercial function.

The whole function was created over the mandate, quarter by quarter, across four areas: network sales, communication, customer experience, and product development with supplier relations. Each with a job description written before the role was filled, carrying deliverables, cadence and metrics.

That detail is the heart of the subject. Writing the description before hiring forces you to know what the role produces. Hiring first and defining later produces a capable person who spends six months guessing what is expected, then leaves.

Fifteen roles designed, four actually filled

On another mandate, an energy group present in ten African markets, I designed a fifteen-role marketing organisation: target structure, role-by-role job descriptions, and a governance model between head office and subsidiaries with a monthly arbitration meeting.

The structure was a target. Four of the group roles were actually filled by named people; others stayed to be identified. I say so because the heroic version of this story would be false, and because the exact version is more useful: the design was partly applied, and the part that was applied held.

Leading people who know the company better than you

The remit there was functional, not hierarchical. Several members of the team I led had more tenure in the company than I did, including one who had arrived four years before me.

That is harder than running a team you recruited, and it teaches more. Without a reporting line, a decision cannot be imposed, it has to be demonstrated. The written framework becomes the only lever: one definition per metric, shared daily visibility, and execution autonomy left with local teams while the group keeps the truth of the numbers.

Where those people are today

This is the part that actually answers the opening question. Without naming them, here is what became of members of that team: senior consultant at a Big Four firm covering francophone Africa, head of marketing and communications at a bank in Kigali, head of partnerships at a major East African operator, franchise success manager for a Ghanaian distributor, head of brand and marketing at a Togolese oil company, independent creative director.

None of those trajectories was made possible by training I delivered. They were already there. What was missing was the framework that makes a skill visible, measurable and demonstrable, which is to say transferable elsewhere.

The missing layer, defined precisely

It is not mentoring, not capacity building, not a training programme. It is four very concrete objects, and they are written before anyone is hired.

A job description that says what the role produces, at what cadence, and how its success is measured. One single definition per metric, shared between head office and markets, otherwise each country measures something different and the comparison is false. A proof of completion required by the process, otherwise the process dies without anyone reporting it. And dated governance, a monthly arbitration meeting, otherwise decisions get taken over messaging apps and are lost.

Those four objects cost nothing to produce. They cost thinking time and precision, which is exactly what a fast-growing company does not want to spend.

What this changes

The debate about African talent has been held in the wrong terms for twenty years. The question is not whether it exists, the answer is written in the careers above. The question is whether your company can hold it: tell it what is expected, measure it honestly, and give it a record of what it produced.

Five years after that coffee, Benjamin launched Open Circle Africa to build exactly that layer at continental scale. I work with them.