By Michael Elliott
-Excerpt-
That impression is not wholly false. Africa is the world’s poorest continent. Living there are some 70% of the world’s poorest people. But poverty and despair are far from the whole story. Fueled by buoyant commodity prices, the period before the onset of the Great Recession marked Africa’s best period of economic growth in a generation (output grew by more than 6% in 2007 and 2008%) — and even in 2009 the continent as a whole managed to grow by 2%. The next step is to do something valuable with the resources you’ve either killed or dug out of the ground.
In 1987, I visited a tannery in Kenya supported by the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, which, unusually, was not exporting raw hides but finishing them into high-quality leather for shoemakers in Europe. Keeping the value-added at home, the tannery’s manager told me, was vital to its success. Nearly a quarter-century later that’s still true. The first step in African development, says Patrick Dupoux, who helped write a new Boston Consulting Group (BCG) report on growing African companies: “Optimize your natural resources. Provide more value-added than you have in the past.”
Even if you do that, making a success of business in Africa is hard.
Read more: The new global opportunity – Jun. 21, 2010.
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