How to Be a Successful Freelancer in Africa?

It took 10 years to get here and only 3 years to become the most respected young influencer in the digital market for responsibly carrying the Freelancing flag.

When talking about Africa in American or European countries, there is always that thought that Africa lacks the concept of democracy both politically and economically. This causes most companies to limit the distribution of their platforms to other markets, excluding the African audience from their segmentations. One of the reasons was Skrill that in 2018 decided to block access to my region and without returning the balance they had in their customers' accounts. Many other examples of platforms that Africans could work and earn money as autonomous workers have just recently started to make their first steps. For example Amazon Creator, Apple Music, Spotify, Dailymotion among others. Currently, platforms like Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, TikTok, are used with segmentations from other countries, meaning that the individual must sign up as a foreigner to earn money with such platforms as a content creator.

For me, the struggle to get to where I am was not easy at all, the difficulty in accessing web services, made my rise to freelancing quite difficult. I had to diversify as much as possible by way of being a freelancer so that everything I needed, worked out exactly right. And that's how I started chasing things like a dog following its master.

How did I start my freelance career?

I started my freelance career by booting from a trip I had taken in America in 2017.

As a normal bank customer, with plans to go on a trip, I applied to my bank for a Visa card so I could fund the expenses of the trip. At the time my country was already mired in a crisis that persists to this day and is getting worse and worse. I was given the card and then I asked to charge the card from the national currency to dollars, the charging was up to the regional director of the bank where I am domiciled. Months later, when the date of the trip arrived, the card had not been charged, I was worried and went to my bank's manager and asked for information as to why the card had not been charged because my trip was already scheduled, the ticket bought and the bags packed. The manager calmly told me that I could travel without problems and that they would charge the card while I was out of the country.

I, with all confidence for a person I respect a lot and have a range of consideration for, listened to the advice and put myself on a Boeing 747 bound for America with a paid ticket and $297 in my pocket in cash.

"I had done well to carry the $297 in my pocket."

Upon arriving at the travel location, I spent the first week and the card at every inquiry nothing was happening. I sent so many e-mails to the bank and nobody answered. I returned from America to my country without the card being charged, and I was inflamed with rage, arrived in my city, went to the bank and the bank apologized for not charging the card because they were giving priority to those who were sick and not to those who went on the leisure trip. From then on I was never the same, I started looking for solutions that could help me to travel the world without needing a local bank.

My first steps in Freelancing

After having gone through that problem, my focus now was to find mechanisms to get foreign currency to fund my outings. At the end of 2017, I started working online and had a gift of $100 in cryptocurrencies, it was the first time in my life that I was getting a digital dollar amount and even more in cryptocurrencies. From there I went on to sign up for on-demand work platforms and from there I started to grow as a freelancer. In 2018, I went to restructure a YouTube channel that I had created in 2011, to talk about financial education and I started to be successful, in my country, I started to be known, some videos were successful in some countries in Africa and the world and I became a bit influential, I already started to receive business proposals and everything around me was changing and having credibility in the market.

Today, I can say that I am not just another freelancer, today I have overcome many barriers and achieved more than I should have perhaps, and I have overcome everything.

There is a great difficulty of being African, but one thing I can say, there is nothing you can't do being in Africa. You just have to be willing to bet and move forward, even more so with a person like me, coming from a country where the language is not English.

To be a successful freelancer, I had to walk the right path and apply the right concepts within the right nuts and bolts.