News & Highlights

  • May 2023
  • EVENT

The Entrepreneurial Journey: Lessons from Keroche Breweries

On May 10, the Africa Research Center hosted Professor Ramon Casadesus-Masanell in Nairobi for an exclusive event on entrepreneurship, business model design, and new venture growth featuring lessons from Keroche Breweries. The session was inspired by Tabitha and Joseph Karanja's journey in the Kenyan alcoholic drinks industry, starting with their effort to provide low-income consumers with cheap and safe alternatives to informally brewed alcohol and culminating in Keroche's "big bet" entry into the Kenyan beer market. The event was co-hosted by the HBS Alumni Club of Kenya with nearly 70 alumni and community members attending the event.
  • May 2023
  • EVENT

The Confidence Journey: Strategies and Frameworks to Unlock Your Full Potential

This May, the Africa Research Center hosted two events in Nairobi, Kenya and Johannesburg, South Africa for Professor Archie L. Jones. Both events focused on exploring leadership capital and understanding how to develop the assets and skills that are integral to realizing company goals. The events were co-hosted by the HBS Alumni Clubs of Kenya and South Africa and were attended by over 60 HBS alumni and community members.
  • May 2023
  • MBA EXPERIENCE

Kenya FIELD Global Immersion

Between May 5th and May 18th this year, current first year MBA students travelled to Nairobi, Kenya for the first FIELD Global Immersions since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. The FIELD Global Immersion (FGI) is a semester-long first-year (RC) MBA course that culminates in a one-week Immersion at the end of the semester. The course is a capstone of sorts, and it requires students to build on learnings from their first-year courses and apply them to real-world business problems. The students had several meetings with business leaders, corporates, and alumni in Nairobi, Kenya to understand how business is done there.
  • May 2023
  • Executive Education

Senior Executive Program — Africa

In early May, the Senior Executive Program — Africa held the first module of the 2023 cohort in Nairobi, Kenya. Senior African Executive MBA students congregated in Strathmore Business School in Nairobi for MBA classes in strategy, digital innovation, and leadership. They were taught by HBS professors Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Sunil Gupta, as well as faculty members from Gordon Institute of Business and Strathmore Business School. There were several networking events including dinners and mixers with HBS alumni, Kenyan executives and other Strathmore Business School Executive MBA students. One mixer included a presentation from the Equity Bank Group CEO, James Mwangi, highlighting some of the opportunities expected from the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement.

New Research on the Region

  • October 5, 2023
  • Article
  • INSEAD Knowledge

A Smarter Way to Design Business Strategies to Serve the Poor

By: Bhavani Shanker Uppari, Ioanna Popescu, Serguei Netessine and Rowan P. Clarke

  • 2023
  • Working Paper

Cost-Efficient Decarbonization of Portland Cement Production

By: Gunther Glenk, Anton Kelnhofer, Rebecca Meier and Stefan Reichelstein

Accounting for nearly 8% of global annual carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the cement industry is considered difficult to decarbonize. While a sizeable number of abatement levers for Portland cement production is becoming technologically ready for deployment, many are still viewed as prohibitively expensive. Here we develop a generic abatement cost framework for identifying cost-efficient pathways toward substantial emission reductions. We calibrate our model with new industry data in the context of European cement plants that must obtain emission permits under the European Emissions Trading System. We find that a price of 81 per ton of CO2, as observed on average in 2022, incentivizes firms to reduce their annual direct emissions by about one-third relative to the status quo. Yet, these incentives increase sharply at a carbon price of 126 per ton. If cement producers were to expect such carbon price levels to persist in the future, they would have incentives to reduce emissions by almost 80% relative to current emission levels.

  • 2023
  • Working Paper

Toward Decision-Useful Carbon Information

By: Gunther Glenk

Companies are increasingly viewed as crucial drivers for timely decarbonization. Current accounting practices for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, however, often leave corporate carbon disclosures and abatement obscured. Here I introduce a taxonomy for assuring the quality of corporate carbon information. Analog to financial accounting standards, information on a firm's GHG emissions is to be "decision-useful" to stakeholders. That is, it is relevant and faithfully represents the actual changes in atmospheric GHGs associated with a firm's economic activity. Applying the taxonomy, I show that information prepared under the widely used Greenhouse Gas Protocol generally fails to represent a firm's GHG emissions faithfully. Yet, if firms complying with the GHG Protocol adopted the taxonomy, they could directly improve their disclosures by faithfully representing some of their emissions. My findings highlight the need to revise the GHG Protocol, as well as recently proposed carbon disclosure mandates that seek to produce "decision-useful" information but have also adopted the GHG Protocol.

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Johannesburg Staff

Pippa Tubman Armerding
Executive Director
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Tafadzwa Choruma
Administrative, Research and Program Assistant

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Temitayo Lawal
Senior Researcher

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Kuria Kamau
Senior Researcher