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so following along the themes of creativity, when I arrived in Portugal, I was in Lisbon
forabout 4 years. About 2 years into it, my colleagues and I in the commercial section
of the embassy quickly realized that we were getting a stream of inquiries from US companies
that were not specifically interested in the Portaguese market but they were interested
in the broader Lucifon African market. they were looking at Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique.
So after strategizing the best way to respond to this, we realized we could capitalize on
this interest and promote a new way of helping US companies do business in Africa by promoting
partnerships with Portaguese companies that spoke the language and had the contacts and
in many cases were already doing business there. So we just sort of brain storm the
best way to do this and came up with a 2 day event, a conference in Lisbon. At the end
of the day, we had about 350 people who attended the event, we had 5 US ambassadors, 6 African
Ambassadors, the minister of Portaguese of Ministry of Economy came to give the keynote
speech, we had representative of the world bank, exim bank, OPEC, and all the typical
players in the room. It was just a fantastic event that brought people together around
this new concept of business triangulation. At the end of the day, we harvested quite
a few buiness successes from that. I am actually happy to say that although I have left the
embassy at portugal, my successor has carried the torch and is now this month is hosting
the what we are calling Access Africa part II. So to not only create an event but to
see it outlive you and to see a built in longevity follow from the event is probably one of the
accomplishment I am most proud.