WE BELIEVE IN AFRICA’S YOUNG LABOUR FORCE

Africa’s Tomorrow, Powered by the Youth of Today!

Founded in 1952 in Türkiye, Albayrak has blossomed into a vibrant multicultural Turkish enterprise, charting an international success story with over 20,000 employees across 11 countries on 3 continents. The shift from export-oriented growth policies to a strategy that promote overseas investments and integration with global markets undoubtedly underpins our growth trajectory. In this regard, we take immense pride in being both a participant and a facilitator of the profound transformation in the Turkish economy, through policies aimed at expanding our nation’s presence internationally and steering Turkish capital towards foreign direct investments over the past two decades.

Our venture into direct investment, technology, and know-how transfer abroad initially began in Pakistan and has since expanded into various sectors including construction, seaports, airports, waste management, public transportation, textile industry, and agriculture. This diversification has taken place in key African nations such as Somalia, Guinea, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Morocco, as well as in Albania and Azerbaijan, which we consider akin to sister countries.

This expansion has elevated the Albayrak name to a status of international renown. While the genesis of this transformation was driven by the strong and ambitious leadership of our Board of Directors and our skilled, experienced, and dynamic staff, it is primarily our local employees who have been the mainstay and bolstering force behind the continuity of this transformation. In particular, African nations, still bearing the poignant historical burden of colonialism, initially approached foreign investors with caution. However, they warmly embraced our ventures when they observed the tangible benefits of the ‘win-win’ policy, a strategy largely shaped by our President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. While the ‘win-win’ concept is often viewed through an economic lens, for Albayrak, it has transcended to embody the most expected value ‘trust’—signifying not only economic gains but also winning the hearts of the local populace and engaging the local workforce.

In this context, the Albayrak Group, dedicated to fostering local economic development, places significant emphasis on enhancing the rights of employees, encouraging professional growth and improving skills of its local employees. The Group, recognising that the way to become an investable country is to become first of all a liveable country, provides services like garbage collection and public transport to the highest standards, markedly improving the life-quality and directly impacting the daily lives of local communities. Committed to employing 95% local labor in its international projects, Albayrak has emerged as a leader among foreign investors in offering fringe benefits such as food, transportation, insurance, and social benefits.

Through our extensive in-house training programs, local staff have been either trained in Turkey or by international standard trainers who were sent to the host countries, where various field-specific training sessions were conducted. Our policy of employing local labor is not only aimed at enhancing skills through comprehensive training, thereby boosting performance and productivity, but is also grounded in values such as adaptation to a multicultural environment and teamwork. This model is built on the foundations of solidarity, mutual understanding, and cultural exchange. Within this framework, while conducting sensitization activities about local cultures for our Turkish employees, we also actively recruit young Africans who graduate from universities in our country on Turkey Scholarships, integrating them into our ever-expanding team to imbibe our working principles.

The loyalty of our employees can largely be attributed to this dynamic multiculturalism model, meticulously fine-tuned both at our Head Office and across our local investments. The dynamic multiculturalism model has had a profoundly positive impact on both our personnel and port operation performance, with the number of our employees more than doubling in a very short time. In this respect, I believe that our experience with Alport Conakry in Guinea will be highly instructive. The investments we have made in the port of Conakry in Guinea have both increased capacity and made operations more efficient, speeding up port operations and reducing vessel-waiting times to almost zero. As a result, the port of Conakry has been ranked first in West Africa in terms of performance for the past two years. This speed and efficiency saves importers from paying high demurrage charges and, we believe, contributes to lower the cost of production and consumption in these countries.

As Albayrak, we are investing in Africa to facilitate the movement of people and goods, improve accessibility and create efficient logistics corridors. We are developing logistics corridors between our concession ports and landlocked countries such as Mali, Chad, Niger, Central Africa and Ethiopia, connecting them to the rest of the world. With our new projects, we aim to develop free trade and industrial zones in all the ports we manage. The logistics infrastructure and storage facilities we will build in these areas will enable Africa to transport its own products to the world. We will also provide industrial infrastructure that is fully integrated with the ports, attracting foreign investors to process local resources on site.