DALBERG’S GLOBAL
MANAGING PARTNER
JAMES MWANGI Celebrating 10 years of Development Consulting he number one primary school student in the entire country of Kenya in 1991 would be elected to the position of number one partner in a reputable global strategic advisory firm 19 years later. In between those two number ones, James Mwangi was admitted to one of his native country’s top high schools, Alliance, en route to the Ivy League institution of Harvard where he pursued a four year Economics degree. In his final year at Harvard, he got his first real spell as a CEO when he was secretary general of the university’s Model United Nations conference in Greece managing a budget of USD100, 000 with delegates from over 300 countries. In the same academic year he worked at Salomon Smith Barney (now part of Citigroup) as a trainee investment banker, a stint which convinced him that investment banking was not for him. “On graduating in 2000, I joined consulting giant Mckinsey in New York as an analyst,” he said when I interviewed him in Rosebank one sunny November afternoon. He struck a much calmer tone than the one I can recall him adopting as Deputy School Captain at Alliance when he once meted out harsh punishment on me and other errant form ones.
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EXPATRIATE
“Memorable projects at Mckinsey include advising an education start up as well as assisting a German bank in acquiring American assets. Towards the end of my second year I was introduced to Henrik Skovby who had just recently left the firm. He had been assigned some significant work at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and was looking to hire a few consultants to assist him.” Skovby started Dalberg whose early life as an advisory firm was attending to UNDP work. James joined the start up entity in 2002; involvement in impacting lives in the developing world appealed to him more than crafting strategies for corporate entities in the Big Apple. “My plan was to work at Dalberg for a few years while waiting to join Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government for their joint graduate programme with the Business School. But when I got admitted into the programme in 2005, I decided to defer for a year as I had just been promoted to manager. The following year the prospect of a partnership position was on the table so I deferred my admission for a further year. By the end of my second deferred year, I was now a partner and in a position to hire graduates of the programme so I opted to continue learning by doing.”
The partnership has established itself as a preferred provider of development advice with a view of building an institution which pursues long term sustainability rather than a business that achieves short term profit. “A typical project would be advising a multinational pharmaceutical manufacturer to develop business models and strategies to profitably serve lower income consumers who currently lack access to its products,” James explained. He initiated the move to open an office in Africa in 2007 favouring Johannesburg as a gateway to the rest of the continent. It was a difficult beginning as the firm was still very much a start up compared to much larger and more established consulting firms. Today they are very much part of the conversation as they are doing work for a number of African Heads of State and have a track record of servicing about 40 of the Fortune 500 companies. “We are a global partnership of 15 partners in 11 locations on four continents. We recently celebrated our tenth anniversary and we have been growing in excess of 25% year on year since 2010.”