Andrew Kuper on the South African Media | Andrew Kuper | Big Think

Andrew Kuper on the South African Media

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The president of LeapFrog Investments talks about the changing role of media throughout the world.

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Andrew Kuper:

LeapFrog is the world’s first investment fund to focus on the insurance needs of low-income and financially excluded people. Launched by President Clinton and hailed by The Wall Street Journal and Private Equity International, LeapFrog has opened a new frontier for social investment and microfinance. Andy founded LeapFrog in January 2007, inspired by his extensive experience enabling entrepreneurs in emerging markets, and then co-built the firm with a team of former CEOs and pioneers in emerging markets insurance. Andy is a former Managing Director of Ashoka, which has financed and connected 2000 social entrepreneurs in over 60 countries. He worked with both Grameen and BRAC, the world's largest microfinance institutions, to market their social ventures. He also co-founded Kuper Research, which designed The Daily Sun, now sub-Saharan Africa's largest newspaper, with 5 million daily readers. Born and raised in South Africa, Andy is a serial social entrepreneur and author of books including Democracy Beyond Borders (Oxford) and Global Responsibilities (Routledge). He holds a PhD from Cambridge, where he was supervised by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, who first stimulated Andy’s interest in market-based solutions to poverty.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What is your experience in the media industry?

Andrew Kuper: My mother and I started a firm called Kuper Research that looked at sociopolitical and media search and strategies. And it was particularly interesting post-apartheid because the media was not very good to serving low income and the majority of the Black population.

Much of the kudos goes to Jos Kuper who saw profound opportunity in the South-African landscape where there was a very large group of people who were not reading but could read, in other words they were alliterate and this is South Africa’s problem, alliteracy not illiteracy.

And we were told all sorts of things, like there’s no culture of reading in Black homes, we’re told this by Black and White people and all sorts of other dubious propositions but that were widely held and we challenged that conventional wisdom. People were consuming media, they were consuming radio, we believe that globally people will consume newspapers and print media, if it’s in a form that makes it interesting for them. Why should people from African be different from anywhere else?

So, a visionary entrepreneur called Deon du Plessis developed a newspaper called The Daily Sun and we helped design that newspaper and The Daily Sun started where the first half is all tabloid and the second half is all knowledge skilling, how are you going to learn from a land bank, what is the interest on your money, how you deal with HIV, key knowledge practical skills. People buy the newspaper for the tabloid and they come back to the newspaper and become repeat consumers because of the profound impact it has on their lives and their ability to control their lives.

Amazingly, this newspaper is now the largest newspaper in Sub-Saharan Africa, in 5 years, it has gone from 0 to 500 million daily readers and two million of those were not reading before. So it’s actually had a macro effect on literacy in the country and Deon du Plessis and Jos Kuper I wade in a few ways but Deon du Plessis and Jos Kuper really are the heroes of this stories, that it had a profound impact on a lot of people and I believe it can be replicated globally.

Question: Why must the media ‘speak softly’?

Andrew Kuper: After apartheid ended in South African, many people believed that the media who have been fundamentally been in favor of the NC because it lead the liberation struggle should give the new government a little bit of a break, should not be too aggressive towards the new government, give them a chance to prove themselves but of course, this runs profoundly countered to some other tenets of journalism which is whoever’s in power hold them accountable and do it extremely firmly and don’t pull your punches which is a fundamental aspect of a successful and vibrant democracy.

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