Working remotely in one of the most remote places on earth
By Professor David Taylor
Ask Liau Kekana, data specialist and mathematical finance guru, about working from Lesotho, and he’ll enumerate its many benefits. Kekana has set up his office in his apartment in Maseru, the country’s capital city, which features some of the highest mountains in southern Africa. With just over 300 000 people, it’s a small capital by many big-city standards. But this rather suits Kekana, who likes to take a walk every day after work, forgetting momentarily about his computer screen and his undertaking of creating financial computer models.
“I definitely think it will be the future of work,” says Kekana. “It suits me, as I have the flexibility to work when and how I want to. I often put in 14-hour days without realising it, as there is nothing to distract me when I’m working.”
Lesotho wasn’t listed among Africa’s top 10 most popular remote working destinations in a recent news report, although, unlike Cape Town, which topped the list, it doesn’t experience disruptive power cuts. In addition to the lights staying on, the cost of living in Lesotho is about 26% less than in South Africa.
Kekana is disciplined when it comes to work, getting up at 06:00 to shower, have coffee, and write down his things to do for the day. By 07:00, he is ready to start work. Currently employed on contract by True North Partners, a global consulting firm, his work, amongst other things, looks at credit modelling, determining individual credit risk, and working on current debt and credit patterns – an area of high interest in the finance and banking sector.
Having recently completed an MCom in Risk Management in Financial Markets at the University of Cape Town’s African Institute of Financial Markets and Risk Management (AIFMRM) following a BSC(Hons) in Civil Engineering, rather than building roads and bridges, Kekana hopes to channel his skills and passion towards Lesotho’s fledgeling fintech industry and work on finance solutions to help boost African development.
Lesotho is a land-locked, geographically hemmed-in (by South Africa on all sides) and socio-economically poor country, battling unemployment and poverty. According to the Afrobarometer survey for 2021/2022, more than 68% of residents don’t have enough food. Kekana thinks one way of boosting development could be through more inclusive financial services. This is backed up by research from global consulting firm McKinsey & Co, which shows that digital financial services could significantly bolster GDPs in emerging countries. The potential for micro, small and medium businesses to access savings and credits is huge – especially in a country like Lesotho, where financial services have been virtually nonexistent.
“We need to consider different data models for people in rural contexts,” says Kekana. “For instance, for those who don’t have a fixed income but get payments and have money coming in on occasion.”
For Kekana, working remotely allows him to stay focused on his mission and in touch with the context he’s most passionate about serving – in a way that a conventional office setting in a city would not. As globally the trend is for bigger corporations to bring their employees back to the office (Google, for instance, is trying to lure workers by organising private concerts and, most recently, updating their hybrid working policy to say that workers who didn’t show up regularly could see it affecting their performance reviews), employees have still not returned at the same levels pre-pandemic. But many employees are also pushing back against convention: more than 41% of workers in one study said they would look for another job if their employer insisted they had to be in the office daily. (Believe it or not, some even said they were willing to take a pay cut to avoid sitting next to an annoying colleague at work).
None of this surprises Kekana – an introvert who shrinks from small talk and socialising with big groups of people. He loves his work and has work-related hobbies, like learning to code in Python or reading up about market behaviours in other parts of the world, and is happy to work from Maseru – for now. “The industry is always advancing; we are gathering and processing more data and exploring how this ties into AI, making models more accurate and predictive. It is exciting.”
While he acknowledges that sometimes he misses out on work meetings or social gatherings and recognises there are some disadvantages to living in a country enclosed entirely by another, Kekana has a flexible, pragmatic mindset that makes it possible for him to pick up tomorrow and be as comfortable working from Barcelona or Hong Kong or London – as long as he can make his coffee first thing in the morning and get his regular news fixes from Al-Jazeera.