Maguelone Biau: “We should refer to the Africas rather than Africa”

There’s no stopping the very active Maguelone Biau (EDHEC Master 2016) and her dynamic career! She is an EDHEC Alumni ambassador in Abidjan, former General Manager of Glovo for Côte d’Ivoire – a super-fast delivery service with a presence in 26 countries in Europe, Asia and Africa – and currently the CEO of KAMTAR, a promising start up in French-speaking Africa. She also appeared on the cover of Forbes Africa in December. Here she tells us about her professional adventures in Africa and her love for this continent that offers her a life in the fast lane.

How would you sum up your position and responsibilities at Glovo?

My primary role was to manage the Glovo brand in Côte d’Ivoire and manage the staff teams in cooperation with all of the company’s departments: marketing, operations, finance and new business lines like dark stores – “ghost supermarkets” in urban areas where customers can have their deliveries in just 10 short minutes. The director must manage unforeseen events, human beings and any challenges that arise. When I joined the project, there were 10 of us; by December 2021 the number had risen to 40. You learn as you go along, and the learning curve is extremely steep. My teams have developed qualities and capacities on their own. It’s the managers who explain to me what will or won’t work in the business! And so I can work more closely on strategy. 

Does Glovo have the same strategy in Côte d’Ivoire as in other countries where it operates? 

At Glovo, there is alignment between all the different countries when it comes to strategy, even though the investments differ depending on the projects. As for intuitiveness, the app’s content and our promise to customers, it’s all identical. It’s not as if we’re going to deliver more slowly just because we’re in Africa! However, we do face operational challenges that don’t always lead to the same results. Here, for example, the deliveryman might have to find the right door without a precise address like we have in Europe.

Have you seen an uptake in Glovo’s services since Covid?

Sub-Saharan Africa has been affected relatively little by Covid. In Côte d’Ivoire, restaurants only closed from March to mid-April 2020, and there haven’t been any restrictions since. And so growth didn’t dry up overnight. Habits didn’t change much, and we continued to gain new clients thanks to the values we offer. That brought us new challenges, which weren’t necessarily the same as in Europe. Côte d’Ivoire doesn’t have the same consumption habits, the same reliance on smartphones or the same access to the Internet, and so on an everyday basis you have to adapt to make sure your offer is relevant. I’m quite proud that people are now using “glovo” in Côte d’Ivoire as a verb in its own right: people “glovo” just as they “google”. We’ve succeeded thanks to repeat usage of our app. We don’t only deliver food, we also do multi-category deliveries: people can order whatever they want, even the charger they might have left at home. 

How does Glovo choose which countries to operate in?

What I’ve noticed is that Glovo goes to countries where there is potential. A dedicated team oversees expansion and analyses countries using different criteria, including population numbers, purchasing power and competition in situ. It’s very difficult to enter a highly saturated market, you need very high levels of financing because your competitors are already bringing millions to the table. Glovo often found itself with lower funds and has always been about doing more with less. When choosing a country, you have to ask if it’s possible to generate a return on investment in the long term. Forging a place on the market is not impossible, it just means optimising your investment allocation.

There are several indicators to look at, but in my view Glovo won’t establish itself in a country without any middle class. In overpopulated countries like Nigeria, even though the middle class is relatively weak, it represents a huge number of people, especially as the country is an economic behemoth. Uganda has huge potential in terms of its middle class, since business is quite concentrated in the capital Kampala, with its motorbike taxis. People there are used to giving money to someone to go and fetch something for them at the corner of the street. So ultimately, Glovo simply formalized a practice that already existed.

Your parents used to take in foreigners at home when you were small, which made you want to discover Africa. Does the Africa of your dreams match the one you have experienced in real life? 

A huge number of things do match. The world I see around me here and the mindset are as I had imagined them in terms of colours – Africa’s sublime fabrics – but also all of the visual images I had formed in my head. Côte d’Ivoire radiates a very pleasant human warmth. The African culture is rich beyond your wildest dreams. We should refer to the Africas rather than Africa. In Côte d’Ivoire alone, there are 60 ethnic groups and more than 100 languages. There is a great oral tradition, with little reliance on text, which ensures that your judgement isn’t too biased, unlike in some other countries where you can get a lot of information beforehand. The French media mostly talk about Africa when there is a crisis, but in human and cultural terms there is a very powerful collective imagination which would benefit from more coverage. My experience here is exceptional, I feel like I belong here, even though I’ve only been here for 5 years. Côte d’Ivoire is also one of the countries with the strongest levels of economic growth in the world (more than 6%). You can sense it in the professional world and in the development of its towns and cities. Buildings are being constructed all the time, it’s a pace of life that really suits me.

Does a career in Côte d’Ivoire allow you to reach positions of responsibility more quickly?

In my opinion, it’s mainly linked to the international start-up dimension, because the other Glovo managing directors elsewhere in the world were the same age as me. However, I would say there are many positions available. On the one hand, there are many talented people who have yet to finish their education – the average age in Côte d’Ivoire is 19 – and on the other, many talented people have moved abroad. Those who leave to study in another country generally return much later. The positions that need to be filled require talented people. And so here young people, who represent a large proportion of the population, are more easily given a chance. International careers advance more quickly in sub-Saharan Africa, you’re given greater responsibility at an earlier stage. I learned quickly in certain posts and positioned myself as needed. At Jumia, I was promoted to a post that required me to move from Côte d’Ivoire to Ghana. I was also supported by the EDHEC network and my network generally. At this stage of my career, I don’t look for work anymore, people come to find me, it’s unbelievably good fortune.     

How do you recruit staff in Côte d’Ivoire? 

I can see in my staff teams that there is clearly a distinction between secondary and higher education. Schooling has to be paid for and is very expensive from nursery school upwards. Many people get private education, which comes at a cost for their parents, not everyone can afford it. Once young people go abroad to study, some of them struggle to come back because they get attractive offers elsewhere. There is also huge family pressure to come and work for a start-up. If the whole family has invested to allow you to go off to study at Harvard, there are certain expectations about the positions and companies you will choose when you return. Like in France, the salaries in start-ups aren’t the same as in banks or in consultancy. I think we are successful in developing skills for all staff members. The hardest thing is managing to find people who already have expertise with new technologies or new economies. We start with people in very junior positions, like me – I had no knowledge of this area beforehand – and they learn as they go along. The pace at which you learn does not depend on whether you come from Côte d’Ivoire or France, it’s just about developing skills.

What would you say drives this need for fast deliveries?

Home deliveries are becoming extremely practical for the middle classes, as it’s a service that meets a need. That need has always been there, but was expressed differently in the past. Whether it’s Kamtar, an intermediary between truck owners and B2B clients, or Glovo, we are in the business of technological solutions that are revolutionising traditional consumer habits. We’ve all ordered food or stuck the phone numbers of a few restaurants to our fridge. People used to head out to get their pizzas or go to the McDrive, but they also used to order food to eat it at home. People like deliveries because they want to be at home together. In companies, people have always eaten with their colleagues, it’s just that one person was chosen to go out and bring back food for everyone. Glovo has facilitated this need, formalized it, simplified it and extended it on an unprecedented scale, facilitating access to everything you might need in the city. When I asked myself why I had become hooked on Glovo independently of working there, I realised it was because I could trust the service.

What makes it important to have a French network, and in particular an alumni network, for an international career? 

It’s clearly what has helped me find all of my jobs. There’s a lot of self-exploration going on when you leave EDHEC, and you’re surprisingly disconnected from the working world. I had had several student jobs, so even though I had an understanding of what that world was about, I just couldn’t imagine the roles I now play today. That’s the strength of the network: I called up CEOs, people in very senior positions who had all the experience to be able to tell me in concrete terms what to expect when I took up a new position. We had extremely enriching discussions about things it was impossible for me to project myself into. A network opens up that door to ask people about the reality of their jobs. As I spoke to people who had the same messages for me, I realised that their jobs weren’t for me. But that’s okay! I knew what not to do to avoid being unhappy. EDHEC Alumni offers that rich access to people with highly diverse careers, all of which are interesting in their own way.