The Coworking Africa conference, the first major event organized on the topic of Coworking in Africa, is to take place in Cape Town, South Africa, on July 23rd and 24th 2015.
During two days, Cape Town will be the African capital of Coworking, an ever more successful work model that is becoming the natural professional environment of the new breed of digital workers, startups, and distributed companies who are shaping the economy of the 21st century. Coworking spaces are (mainly) open floor or building where people active on respective different businesses come to work on a same mutualised flexible place shared with peers.
Africa, too, is ready for a Coworking boom
More than 5.800 spaces are operating in the world. The number almost doubles every year. Although Africa still is a small player in the Coworking landscape, the booming tech scene and major demographic shifts are creating the ideal conditions to unleash the development of many more Coworking spaces all across the continent. Within the last 18 months, the number of Coworking spaces in Africa more than tripled. Nowadays, more than 100 units are in operation on the whole continent, to extend that one can now say : Coworking in Africa is now on the same growth trend Europe and the US were five years ago.
Coworking empowers freelancers, remote employees and entrepreneurs all over Africa in multiple ways. Infrastructure wise, coworking spaces are local hotspot where users can now benefit from an efficient connectivity solutions as well as access to an affordable qualitative working environment to operate their activity in African cities often experiencing high real estate costs. From a business perspective, the community dynamic of a Coworking spaces brings freelancers and small businesses with more visibility and networking opportunities to boost their activity. More broadly, Coworking spaces physically support the development of local entrepreneurial ecosystem, connected with other communities in Africa and in the rest of the world.
The best Coworking experts and practitioners will be in Cape Town in July 2015
More than 100 delegates from Africa and beyond are expected in Cape Town to attend the Coworking Africa 2015 conference.
The conference will operate as meeting platform which will facilitate the emergence personal relationships between the leaders of Coworking spaces, startup accelerators and incubators operators, Coworking catalysts and Coworking users, NGO’s, government representatives, foundations, tech companies and Coworking practitioners from outside Africa. All of them will have the opportunity to share ideas, opinions, knowledge and best practices during the two days conference.
By having a Coworking conference to Africa, the initiators of the conferences hope to support the development of an African Coworking awareness as well as a link between Coworking communities on the continent in order to bring Africa in a global move from which we all can end better off.
Organisation
Coworking Africa 2015 is the result of a partnership between Global Enterprise and Cape Town Office.
Global Enterprise is the producer of the Coworking Europe conference, already organized five times since 2010. The last edition of Coworking Europe took place in Lisbon, Portugal, and gathered 320 people from more than 40 different countries. Coworking Europe works closely with GCUC, organizer of the US Coworking conference GCUC, which has now branches in Australia and Canada.
Cape Town Office, founded by Lizelle van Rhyn, is one of the pioneer and one of the most reputed Coworking space in operation in South Africa. The space is located downtown Cape Town.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!! We can not say it enough! It was a fluuaobs day and we were so happy you were there to make sure the memories are forever captured and remembered.We will highly recommend you to anyone and everyone who wants to listen!Thank you again.Sumien and Julian TurnerX