In early March 2020, Willem Redert visited the city of Madrid, to prepare for the 10-year anniversary of The Regional MSME Investment Fund for Sub-Saharan Africa (REGMIFA). Stakeholders of the fund would fly in from across the globe for a weekend full of festivities. Redert was really, really looking forward to it. And he wasn’t the only one.
“I was also blissfully unaware of something called corona”, recalls Redert, the Marketing Director of Symbiotics Group, which manages REGMIFA from its base in Geneva, Switzerland. A mere few weeks later, the escalating pandemic wiped the whole event off the table.
In the summer, as the first wave of infections was subsiding, Redert decided to explore alternative ways to celebrate the anniversary after all. Redert: “The question was: how? Most of all I knew what I did NOT want: just move the whole thing online and create yet another boring online event, with viewers falling asleep watching an endless series of long-winded speeches and PowerPoint presentations.”