Meet Denis Ruharo, an entrepreneur with a master’s degree, a man who carries a BlackBerry and two cellphones, buys organic greens at a grocery store and sometimes does business over a cold Nile beer at a club called Silk. “I have the mortgage and home improvement,” he said, “The car, carwash and parking tickets. Cable TV, two movies a month. The health club. We vacation twice a year.” “What else,” he said, scrolling down on his Mac laptop. “Newspapers, charity, clothes, books and CDs ...”

In a region more often associated with grinding poverty, Ruharo is part of a modestly growing segment of sub-Saharan Africa—upwardly mobile, low- to middle-income consumers. The group includes working Africans who make as little as $200 a month, a paltry sum by Western standards, yet hardly the $1 a day that describes life for about half the continent’s population. Perhaps a third of all Africans, or 300 million people, fall into a middle category—struggling to put their kids through school and pay rent, but able to buy a cellphone or DVD once in a while.

Their buying power is evident around Kampala, a green and hilly city where iron-sheet homes are interspersed with high-rise condos, streets are crowded with bikes and Japanese sedans, and the city’s newest mall, Oasis, is under construction. It will be anchored by what amounts to sub-Saharan Africa’s first Target-style superstore chain, Nakumatt, which sells corn flour, aromatherapy bath salts and nearly everything else. The company is opening two other superstores here, two in Rwanda, three in Tanzania and 11 in Kenya.Said Thiagarajan Ramamurthy, Nakumatt’s operations director: “The appetite is increasing—the 14-inch TV became a 21-inch. The 21 became a 29 and the 29 became plasma. It’s an aspiration.”

... contd.