It’s Time to Get Real About Africa: How Africa.com is Sparking Change?

If Africa were to be measured in idiosyncrasies of its critics, it would always have a dark enveloping shadow conceal its shine. No more is it a dark continent.

No more is Africa just about wild safaris or its enormously engrossing tribal culture, evidently stemming from a love of the world to revisit the yesterday in lines with an antagonistic present.

Africa is home to some of the largest oil-reserves located in Nigeria, is a huge carver of diamonds, traded extensively at a global stage and above all, a precipice standing at which one can look at brighter tomorrows and visionary ideas.

So whether you are attracted by the forthcoming prospects of seeing the tallest skyscraper exchange notes on African skies, with ‘The Pinnacle’ (in Nairobi)  commanding extensive interest of those around the world or someone who’s besotted with a vibrant entrepreneurial scene in a continent of diverse culture, Africa has more than a bit for everyone, it seems.

But this doesn’t mean that Africa hasn’t courted its own unique set of challenges. Often, owing to distrust, mismanagement and sheer lack of will of those who govern its countries and regions, Africa has witnessed fallouts with sustained growth and development, the aspect of terrorism plaguing Western African countries hampering peace and goodwill in the continent of magnanimous opportunities.

But even then, facets such as burgeoning trade figures with different parts of the western world, an industrial climate, and an atmospherics permitting entrepreneurship and creativity to blossom, Africa has ceded past phenomenon concerned with inactivity and is robustly growing in manifold ways.

Thus, to cover the huge gap between two existing realms that function in parallel- one that offers insight about the huge continent and the other, that is unaware of what’s going on, a digital repository of information came about in the shape of Africa.com

With an aim to understand what lies in the heart of the real Africa, attempting to put forward a case for some positive reflection on a continent often only viewed from a singular lens that depict no more than its ills or malaise, Africa.com is leading some fine change about the mighty vast continent.

So recently when Teresa H. Clarke, the leading light of Africa.com was bestowed with the revered Lifetime Achievement Award, extended by the Nigerian Higher Education Foundation, a wave of curiosity was evident both within and outside the organizational contours of Africa.com

Highlighting the essence of Africa.com by speaking of the movements’ DNA, Teresa H. Clarke rightly summed up the idea by saying, “ We want people to see the tremendous triumphs, the tremendous culture, the tremendous beauty and the tremendous grace that exists in Africa”.

In the spectrum of internet entrepreneurship, Teresa H. Clarke, (Chairman & CEO, Africa.com) is a name that is perhaps as common as the sight of a magician unveiling a rabbit from underneath a hat.

Having contributed to the social development of a region often reduced to a one-dimensional approach of downing by the media, Africa, one reckons deserves a broader, shape-shifting focus so as to include its cultural, entrepreneurial and financial triumphs in the past decade and a half. Giving global brands an online access to a whopping number of 15 million affluent audience base, Africa.com can be understood as the bridge to connecting the wider world to one of the world’s most emphatic albeit lesser-discovered continents.