About Simuka AP

Africa's management quality transformation firm.

Simuka Advisory Partners exists for one purpose: to drive productivity growth across African enterprises — and through them, to accelerate the continent's economic transformation. We are not a general management consultancy. We are a boutique practice built entirely around a single, evidence-grounded conviction: that management quality is the most underestimated variable in African economic development, and that closing the management gap is both tractable and urgent.

Why this firm exists

The Gap We Set Out to Close

For decades, the consulting and advisory market in Africa has been populated by three categories of firm: the global majors, whose engagements are priced for large corporates and multinationals; the generalist local boutiques, which cover a wide range of services with varying depth; and the donor-funded technical assistance providers, whose objectives are set by funders rather than by the enterprises themselves.

None of these categories is organised around the proposition that management quality is a measurable, improvable input to firm-level productivity — and that improving it produces returns that compound across the economy. Simuka AP was founded to occupy that space.

We draw on the empirical management science literature — particularly the work of Bloom, Van Reenen, McKenzie, Woodruff, and their collaborators — to bring rigorous, evidence-based advisory to African firms and to the capital allocators who invest in them.

The intellectual thesis

Management Is a Technology

The word "management" is often heard as a soft concept — leadership styles, culture, organisational development. In the literature we build from, it is a production factor: as concrete in its effects as capital equipment, and as amenable to deliberate investment.

Bloom and Van Reenen's structured Management Practices Survey, conducted across 35 countries, finds that differences in management practices explain approximately 30 percent of the total factor productivity gap between the world's most and least productive economies. In a randomised controlled trial with Indian textile manufacturers, a management consulting intervention produced a 17 percent productivity gain within three months, with no additional capital input (Bloom et al., QJE 2013). The mechanism is not motivational. It is operational: better-defined targets, tighter feedback loops, clearer accountability, more systematic use of information.

Africa's management quality, on average, sits significantly below the global frontier. This is not a fixed condition. It is the gap we close.

"Management problems are solvable. Productivity growth is not primarily a capital problem — it is a management problem."
The Simuka AP founding conviction
How we engage

The Simuka AP Engagement Model

01

Diagnose

We begin with the Growth IQ Assessment — a structured diagnostic that maps a firm's management practices against global benchmarks and identifies the specific gaps most consequential for productivity. This is not a survey. It is an evidence-based audit.

02

Design

From the diagnostic, we co-develop with leadership a transformation agenda: the specific management systems, process designs, and capability investments that address the gaps with the highest return.

03

Deliver

We work alongside the leadership team through implementation. We are not a report-and-leave firm. We remain engaged through the change, troubleshoot in real time, and hold ourselves accountable to outcomes.

04

Measure

We track productivity indicators agreed at the outset. The engagement is not complete until the data moves.

The people behind the work

Leadership

A focused partnership of practitioners with deep conviction in Africa's management quality opportunity.

Nelson Kasadha, MBA

EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN

As Executive Chairman, Nelson stewards Simuka AP's founding conviction: that Africa's productivity gap is, to a significant degree, a management gap — and that closing it is both significant and urgent.

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Cecilia Kengoro Mutabanura, MBA

MANAGING PARTNER

Cecilia is Simuka AP's Managing Partner. She leads strategy execution as well as the Enterprise Growth and Investment practice that is based on one premise: capital follows management quality, and most African firms are closer to investable than they look.

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Sheila Agaba

PARTNER

Sheila is a Partner at Simuka AP, leading its Delivery & Implementation practice — from an engineer's conviction: delivery is structurally and systematically orchestrated, not hoped for, and what an institution cannot measure, it cannot improve.

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