“Develop more skills in Africa”

2023-10-28 20:00:00

In Africa, Atos, a French IT group, operates in twelve countries on the continent, with more than 2,500 employees and nearly 100 million euros in turnover. This is small compared to the 112,000 employees worldwide and the group’s annual turnover of around 11 billion euros.

However, since the announcement of a plan to split the group’s activities in two in June 2022, it’s been a bit of a no-brainer for the leaders.

The details provided on August 1, on the proposed sale of the outsourcing activities (IT outsourcing) of the company, brought together in the subsidiary Tech Foundations to the Czech billionaire, Daniel Kretinsky, aroused the anger of several minority shareholders who judged this operation too favorable to the Czech businessman. Especially since the latter plans to take a stake in Eviden, the other subsidiary of Atos, specializing in cybersecurity and supercomputers and which would stand on its own two feet after the split. The Czech businessman would be ready to buy 7.5% of the capital of Eviden, which would make him the largest shareholder. The Atos share price fell 48%.

To try to calm concerns, management was entrusted at the beginning of October to a new general director, Yves Bernaert, the third in this position since 2021. The president of the group since 2019, Bertrand Meunier, finally threw in the towel. On October 16, Jean-Pierre Mustier, independent director of the group, was confirmed as president of Atos. However, the plan to split the group has not been abandoned. The project, which must still be submitted for shareholder approval at a future extraordinary general meeting, will not be ratified before the second quarter of 2024.

The upheavals of the siege are not commented on on African soil. On the other hand, on the occasion of “Voice of Africa”, organized by the Mohamed 6 Polytechnique University in Bengeurir, on the sidelines of the assemblies of the World Bank and the IMF, Alpha Barry, Managing Director Africa of Atos, willingly speaks in an interview given to Point Africa, the group’s strategy in Africa. On the continent, Atos is focusing on strengthening its positions and banking on African youth to look to the future and continue its development.

Africa Point: What strategy will Atos deploy in Africa in the years to come, in terms of geographical positioning and business development?

Alpha Barry : Atos’ strategy in Africa is first of all to make available to clients – public, private, banking, telecoms, etc. – Atos’ offering to modernize and digitalize business processes. This is our reason for being.

The second point of strategy is to develop more skills in Africa to be able to serve markets other than the African market, as we have already done in Morocco with the offshore digital activity. We are doing it now in Senegal. To do this, we must train more resources and young talents in Africa and even contribute to the return of employees from the diaspora to the country. In Senegal, we recruited around fifty engineers who worked in France. At our Dakar site, around a third of the 400 engineers work on offshore projects.

Our third ambition is to support start-ups on certain projects which target poor populations in Africa. We can cite mobile money which provides banking services to populations who do not have a bank account. Many other ideas can emerge through local start-ups.

We welcome young start-ups, we equip them and support them in training, mainly in Senegal but the objective is to do so in the eleven other countries where we are present.

Historically, we have a strong position in French-speaking countries. My ambition is to become number 1 in all French-speaking countries. In Ivory Coast, this is not the case. In this country, we have retained Bull’s activities. As a reminder, in 2014 Atos bought the activities of Bull, which specializes in infrastructure, equipment and data centers. Conversely, in Senegal, Atos took over Bull, but invested to create an Atos company with a global delivery center. My ambition today is to transform Bull CI into Atos CI, as in Senegal, to develop more services.

This year, we also created a subsidiary Atos Togo and started activities with twelve employees. The country has entrusted us with an important project: the implementation of biometric identity for the Togolese. This involves identifying populations with iris, face and fingerprints. Every Togolese will be able to have a biometric identity and a card without having to use their birth certificate. Two witnesses will be required. This project will be deployed over 2024-2025. We have a similar project underway in Morocco, where we have already enrolled more than 10 million Moroccans who now have a digital identity. I hope that we will develop this type of solution in other countries.

As for our presence in English-speaking Africa, our subsidiary in South Africa employs around a hundred people. From South Africa we cover Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda…. mainly with a large client MTN, the largest telecoms operator in Africa. However, my primary ambition concerns our traditional markets where we can still do better. Atos in Africa has more than 100 million turnover, with continued and significant growth.

The value of a group like Atos is based on its human resources. How do you train, attract and retain your digital talents?

We are in the premises of the Mohamed 6 Polytechnic University, where we signed a partnership this year to support university students, by bringing in experts from Atos to help them concretely on projects. We are committed to taking interns into our offices every year, with the ambition of having them work on research topics, so that they can help us find concrete solutions that meet the needs in the region. We also have agreements with universities in Senegal, Ivory Coast and South Africa.

We have also engaged in training with 01Talent, a teacher-free school that operates based on peer learning. In Senegal, we started in November 2022 with around 120 engineers in training for a period of two years. Atos is committed to recruiting 60 engineers. At the end of the two years, they will have received very solid training and we have no concerns about their future.

The worry is maybe they are going somewhere else?

This is what we are already experiencing. At Atos in Senegal, we have employees who leave us for Canada and France, others decide to become freelancers. For this reason, we need a permanent pool in order to recruit and ensure that the initial turnover is not higher than the entrants.

We also launched Atos Digital Academy in Senegal, Ivory Coast and Morocco, with the help of German cooperation. We select young people who have training but no practice, and we train them for six months in our premises. After this training, they are immediately operational.

Finally, for three years, in association with the NGO Women in Africa, we have been training young girls from the high school of excellence in Gorée (the island opposite Dakar). Each year, 35 young girls in their first and final year are trained in digital technology.

The first year, when we took stock, I asked the young girls if any of them wanted to become a computer scientist? The answer: zero! I wasn’t proud (laugh). I asked the professor the reasons for this failure? He told me that we had trained the young people but not the teachers.

For a year, we have been training teachers and we will also continue this program with Women in Africa in other countries. In our workforce, more than 30% are women, but our ambition is to increase this percentage, not only for ethical reasons but also for reasons of efficiency and skills.

We need to train young people, develop offshore digital, and get them to work on global projects. Africa, in 2050, will have more than 2 billion people, more than half of whom are under 25 years old. It is as much a challenge as an opportunity. We must train, feed and give work to this youngest population in the world.

What actions and projects are being carried out within the group to reduce its carbon footprint – and which could be presented at the next COP – but also to reduce the impact?

A preparatory meeting will be held at the end of October in Dubai. The group will present a portfolio of actions planned to contribute to decarbonization. In Africa, our contribution ideas relate to what is called in researchers’ jargon frugal innovation, innovation which does not require heavy investments but which are innovations which meet the basic needs of poor populations.

In Madagascar, we are developing a platform to connect rice producers and buyers. Farmers who produce rice have no visibility in relation to customers or the market. This platform, still in prototype form, makes it possible to create a link between producers and potential buyers. We are in discussions with public authorities for its large-scale generalization. These are the types of ideas that we want to develop to help people first escape poverty, but also to reduce the carbon footprint on the environment.