The story of the African business and the African entrepreneur could be likened to that of a fictional goose and farmer respectively. The latter is said to have miraculously received a goose – a special goose that laid golden eggs. He was delighted at the prospect of finally finding a way out of poverty. He could sell the eggs and make a fortune, which he did.Unfortunately, the goose laid only an egg a day. That was simply not fast enough for the soon-to-be-rich farmer. One day, he got a “brilliant” idea to cut open this goose so he could extract all the eggs at once. To his utter dismay, however, there were no eggs in the belly of the goose!So with one decision, he lost both the goose and the golden eggs. The African Goose Summit is an annual event that seeks to preserve the lives of the ‘Geese’ on the continent in order to alleviate poverty and change the African narrative one ‘Goose’ and ‘Farmer’ at a time.The maiden edition of the summit is themed “Winning: Strategies for leveraging the African Free Trade Agreement to scale up”. The key objective is to equip the entrepreneurs and business leaders with effective strategies for scaling in the face of open borders and continuously growing competition.The organizers, Karen Halm International, believe that these strategies can be applied to both businesses and lives, to drive economic sustainability and profitability of African businesses.“When the boarders are opened for free trade in Africa, will it be a blessing or a curse to you and your business?”, asks Karen Halm, the Convener of the African Goose Summit 2020. “As African entrepreneurs, we need to know what inputs we can source from our own continent before looking elsewhere – once the money remains on African soil, together we will rise”, she opines.Against the backdrop of the theme of the summit, speakers from across a wide spectrum of industries and fields of business expertise will get delegates to ponder and discuss how to address challenges such as access to relevant data for new market entry; strategies for deploying the internet and technology to scale across borders and how to dominate their markets. The African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCTA) will be looked at and broad strategies for maximising the gems in it will be laid out.Speakers at the one-day event slated for February 7, 2020 at the Accra International Conference Centre, include Vish Ashiagbor, Country Senior Partner for PwC Ghana, Ato Micah, Managing Principal of Maverick Research, Elikem Asenath Commey, West Africa Manager of the Stanford Seed Network; Ogbo A. Ogbo, founder of RapidScaling Ltd., and Nikita Burman, founder of The BlueJeans.