adminSTANDARD Chartered plans to hire at least 1 000 more staff in Africa in the next couple of years, an increase of more than 10 percent, even as its expansion elsewhere has slowed. Diana Layfield, the chief executive for Africa, declined to specify where the extra staff would go, but picked out Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana as three of the most attractive markets.
“Nigeria has to be close to the top of everybody’s list [for expansion]… It has scale, growth and real dynamism,” she said Tuesday.
Nigeria overtook South Africa as the continent’s biggest economy this year after a rebasing of its gross domestic product. “Our opportunity in Africa is constrained by the ability to invest at pace, and that’s not just a financial constraint but also management capacity.
So the real challenge is prioritisation,” Layfield said at a briefing on Africa by the London-based bank. After a decade of expansion that took it to 89 000 staff globally, Standard Chartered has put the brakes on hiring in the past two years. It has about 8 100 staff in 15 countries in Africa. It opened a subsidiary in commodities-rich Angola in January. — Reuters.
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