Khensani Siwedi

What does your company do?

Conté Africa is the creative pillar and leader in brand strategy and social impact. Our mission is to keep emerging businesses and non-profit organisations alive and thriving. We understand the challenges that young organisations face and ensure that the heart of your organisation keeps beating. We do this by strengthening your brand, advocating for your mission and cultivating relationships between organisations and stakeholders. Our focus is on helping social impact organisations create change in their communities by strengthening their brand awareness. We help them capture the essence of their impact story and inspire action through carefully crafted brand experiences. As a brand and strategy agency, we provide designers, creative thinkers and experts to work with non-profit organisations, foundations and philanthropists. Our goal is to help them refine their mission and strengthen their organisation's branding to achieve and enforce their social goals. By focusing on the area of social impact, we ensure that targeted and sustainable solutions for the needs of local communities are at the forefront. Conté strives to be the creative pillar and pioneer in brand strategy and social impact. Our aim is to strongly influence and revitalise the creative sector by providing more opportunities for artists, designers and creative thinkers in Africa and around the world.

What is your biggest success?

We began as a publishing house. We built partnerships and mentored numerous designers, writers, photographers and others, and quickly became the mobile creative centre for Africa, focusing on the African creative scene and providing opportunities for the creatives we had in our database. Our magazine was distributed in South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, New York, Los Angeles and the UK. Eventually made a name for ourselves in the social impact and NPO space and played to our strengths by shifting our focus to brand development. Today, we are a thriving brand strategy agency. We have actively mentored the creatives we have featured, strategically partnering them with industry leaders and global brands like Rolls Royce and Global Citizen. These partnerships have led to paid opportunities such as campaigns, jobs and commissions. This has led to the development of a database of creatives, non-profit organisations and foundations across the African region.

What has been your biggest hurdle?

The expansion of our organisation after Covid-19 proved difficult and unfortunately slowed down our ability to work and led us to stop producing our magazine and working with our full database of creatives as we could no longer accommodate them due to a lack of projects. We downsized our team and only worked on projects for the clients we had. This meant we had less revenue, which impacted our internal team, salaries, our office costs and maintaining the marketing services of our business. All of this impacted how we could further market ourselves to attract more companies that needed our services and were unaware of the benefits of working with an organisation like ours. We were able to capitalise on the lack of opportunities to rebrand and market ourselves through word of mouth to access the current market.