Sudanese success abroad: where the instinct comes from, and what it costs

Aziz Musa makes the same observation here that he makes often: the more Sudanese people leave Sudan, the more of them succeed. Go to America or Canada and the hospitals and the engineering offices are full of them, and not every nationality can say that about itself. He calls it a native resourcefulness and says he has not seen it in any other people. The useful question is not whether that is true, but what Sudanese success abroad is actually made of, and what it costs.

His guest is Dr Abeer Ali, an economist who runs a training centre and a restaurant, both now in Cairo. She agrees with him and then hands him the bill. The country's problem, she says, is human resources: the capable people leave. The economic problem comes out of a social problem, and the social problem is the human being. Aziz puts it from the other side. Sudan's political and economic problems are real, but the complaint everybody makes over tea starts with the individual.

She graduated from the University of Khartoum in 2005 with honours in pure economics, wanting a job she could use to repay her father and her family. She looked for one, in companies and banks, from 2005 until 2013. Nothing came. She will not name the country when she explains it, only the category: in a developing economy the unemployment rate is high, and this is what it does to a graduate.

What she did with those years is the part worth copying. A masters finished in 2013. University teaching around 2016 to 2018. A doctorate in economics, in Islamic economic theory, finished in 2019. Then she stopped knocking on the doors of banks and companies altogether and founded Value, a training and marketing centre, in 2020, on Street 60 in Khartoum. Aziz asks whether she would take a bank job now, the top post in a department. She says she might well refuse. There was a stretch when a job was the best option she could see. Then she was moved onto another line, and that line fits what she can actually do.

Her capital came from one decision. Her husband could have funded her and she told him she wanted the challenge of starting without anyone giving her money. She sold her gold bangles and that was the capital. Aziz reads it the way he reads most of these stories: people who are serious about a business find a route in the end.

She has studied the people who want to start something and do not, and they nearly all believe the obstacle is money. For small and medium projects she says plainly that it is not. Put capital on one side of the scale and knowledge and skills on the other, and the second side decides. Someone with capital can start a project and fail. Someone with skill and no capital can start and succeed. She is not pretending money is irrelevant. After her own experience she gives the weight to the other side.

The second answer is harder on her own audience. Ask small producers why sales are falling and they say the same word, marketing. She tells them the problem is not marketing, it is training, and that they have never taken any training in marketing at all. Her own base is economics and business administration, which she calls cousins of marketing rather than the thing itself, so she took intensive courses in marketing, sales, management, leadership and accounting, and learned the rest by running the work.

She means technical training as much as management training. Someone who never reached a degree can be trained in a trade, vehicle repair, general maintenance, the handmade work that a great many women already do. Her example of a country that grew this way is Malaysia, which grew by training its people.

She came to Egypt before the war, for a family reason, and kept running the Khartoum centre online from a laptop at home. Then came the coup and the internet was cut for about a month. Her own sentence for it is the one to keep: they closed me off from my audience. The resourcefulness did not stop working. It had nothing left to work on, because the people it served were on the other side of a cut cable.

So she rebuilt in person. She opened a Value branch in Mohandessin, at Lebanon Square, on the basis that the Sudanese audience in Egypt could at least be reached in a room. It ran about a year and a half. Then the war came and she opened Al Mafrouka, a Sudanese restaurant, which has been running about three years. She has only recently restarted the centre.

Aziz asks what the restaurant taught her that made the centre work better, and the answer is more honest than the question. She does not consider the restaurant her field at all. It is a project she runs and that pays. The centre is what fifteen years of study were for, and she prices it deliberately low, never above 100 dollars and often 20 or 50, because the price follows the mission rather than the competitors. Aziz says the obvious thing out loud, that the restaurant brings in more than the centre, and she agrees at once. That is what flattery leaves out. The instinct travels. The market you trained for does not.

However many of them leave Sudan, that is how many of them succeed.

The initiative she launched around 2021 or 2022 was called Be a Producer. The first reason was the obvious one, people with degrees and no work. The second costs her something to say. Social life at home runs on extravagance: the weddings, the funerals, the food, the clothes, the hall. She is careful about where the line sits. She is not against a person spending what they have. She is against what it does to the person who cannot and copies it anyway. Every country that pulled out of this, she says, started by teaching people to ration what they consume.

What she teaches a room of young people is not a technique. Work on yourselves, stay current with the world, because one click now reaches anyone anywhere. Change starts with individuals, because individuals make a society and societies make a state. Aziz ends on the practical version of the same thought, and it lands on the diaspora: Sudanese companies should be hiring Sudanese companies. We go looking outside Sudan for the treasure, and the treasure is in front of our eyes.