History

Relocation Africa’s History

The company was started in 1993 by Rosemary Maytham. Her motivation was 2-fold: firstly, from her pioneering experience relocating her family from Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) during the Rhodesian Bush War in 1976 and then providing guidance for friends who followed, and secondly, with the imminent release of Nelson Mandela, she saw an opportunity for a service that could support the expected influx of global businesses back into the New South Africa.

The first client that Relocation Africa serviced was a consortium of 17 families who moved into Johannesburg, South Africa from the US. This project gave Relocation Africa the start it needed to launch inbound relocation services.

Her daughter, René Stegmann, was studying towards a career in Strategic Marketing and assisted her by writing the business plan. Although René’s initial intention was to follow this career, she got more and more immersed in the business, and 2 years later, at the age of 24, René took over the reins.

Running a young business in an immature industry had many challenges, but working with the constantly adjusted business plan and sticking to the core values, since 2002, Relocation Africa has been the largest independently run destination services business in Africa.

Initially, Relocation Africa focused on inbound destination services for corporate multinational clients in South Africa. Over the years, the business has incorporated complementary services and initially adding Visa and Immigration services for South Africa in the late 1990s, 2002 Relocation Africa expanded into Africa. Starting in Kenya and Nigeria, the countries quickly started to grow with Tanzania, Ghana and Senegal following soon after.

As we grew our footprint, a challenge that would often confront the business was unrealistic housing budgets being set by our clients, so in 2003 Relocation Africa’s sister business, Global Expatriate Management which had been launched in 2000 providing payroll solutions in Africa, started doing Research across Africa. This housing data gave our clients a more realistic view of the housing market, and this research business now not only collects Housing data, but also Schooling Data, Cost of Living Data, Vehicle prices and other relevant HR data to provide Global HR departments with the information they require for making informed HR decisions for their expatriates moving across Africa.

Since 2015, both businesses now form the Relocation Africa Group, a full-stack African HR-related services provider for global HR departments.

There are four divisions:
Mobility Division – which incorporates orientation, home search, school search, settling-in and departure services as well as Cultural training and any other bespoke services required to ensure international assignees with a successful move into or out of most African countries.
Immigration Division – which manages the full suite of visa services across many African countries,
Remuneration Division – which includes international payroll, international payments, expense management and employer of record services across 40 African countries
Research Division – which covers housing, schooling, vehicle and cost of living surveys across all countries on the Africa continent.