In today’s global environment, making strategic business choices is key to successful decision-making. This book is intended to assist any multinational companies or executives to swiftly understand the business environment in the sub-Saharan African region and avoid common mistakes. It will also assist investors who are dreaming to familiarize themselves with the region’s business environment to know what is required to make a success of venturing in sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, this book will also inspire the African entrepreneurs to be gifted players on the global marketplace. This unique text provides an occasion for an excellent strategic approach to its users to explore the economic, ethical, and moral practices and the political, legal, technological, and regulatory issues of the sub-Saharan African countries to better handle the challenges and opportunities managers will face while making their operational decisions. In addition to the topics aforementioned, issues such as economic development, exports/imports, natural resource inventory, the monetary system in different sub-Saharan African countries, and trade and foreign direct investment themes will also be addressed. Understanding the African approach to business and being mindful of the business culture will lead to great success while conducting business on the African continent.

The blue economy, comprising coastal and marine resources, offers vast benefits for sub-Saharan Africa: of the 53 countries and territories in the region, 32 are coastal states; there are 13 million sq km of maritime zones; more than 90% of the region’s exports and imports come by sea; and the African Union hails the blue economy as the ‘new frontier of African renaissance’. Despite their importance, the region’s coastal and marine resources have been neither fully appreciated nor fully utilized. They are only now being recognized as being key to Africa’s potential prosperity. As the region grows, it has, in general, not taken adequate safeguards to protect these valuable resources. That is partly because some of the problems (pollution, for example) are regional and know no borders. All too often, short-term gains are made at the expense of the long term (overfishing, for example). This book provides, for the first time, a study of the constraints and opportunities the blue economy offers for sub-Saharan Africa. It includes an introduction and overview; sectoral analyses (including tourism, fisheries, mineral resources, culture, shipping and maritime safety); country case studies; and analyses of regional and international efforts towards better coastal zone and marine management.

Africa suffers from two main diseases: poor management and a lack of vibrant entrepreneurial activity. The continent has the raw materials, the people, and the potential to be developed, and yet there remain barriers that prevent it from bettering itself. To promote entrepreneurship as an engine of economic development and growth, the author has developed a Quintuple Helix Model which advocates mutual cooperation and information sharing among the five helices and provides valuable guidelines to policymakers on how to build entrepreneurship ecosystems in sub-Saharan Africa. It goes on to examine the roles that government, donors, and public and private sectors play and how Africans themselves might take the development of entrepreneurial societies into their own hands. The book includes seven chapters that emphasize the key role that each of the five components could play in the development of entrepreneurial ecosystems. Entrepreneurship scholars, policy makers, and national and local governments of sub-Saharan Africa will value this insight as they strive to create a more favorable landscape for their citizenry.

In today's global environment, making strategic business choices is key to successful decision-making. This book is intended to assist any multinational companies or executives to swiftly understand the business environment in the sub-Saharan African region and avoid common mistakes. It will also assist investors who are dreaming to familiarize themselves with the region's business environment to know what is required to make a success of venturing in sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, this book will also inspire the African entrepreneurs to be gifted players on the global marketplace. This unique text provides an occasion for an excellent strategic approach to its users to explore the economic, ethical, and moral practices and the political, legal, technological, and regulatory issues of the sub-Saharan African countries to better handle the challenges and opportunities managers will face while making their operational decisions. In addition to the topics aforementioned, issues such as economic development, exports/imports, natural resource inventory, the monetary system in different sub-Saharan African countries, and trade and foreign direct investment themes will also be addressed. Understanding the African approach to business and being mindful of the business culture will lead to great success while conducting business on the African continent.

This book brings together new household and enterprise data from 41 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to inform policy makers and practitioners on ways to expand women entrepreneurs’ economic opportunities. Sub-Saharan Africa boasts the highest share of women entrepreneurs, but they are disproportionately concentrated among the self-employed rather than employers. Relative to men, women are pursuing lower opportunity activities, with their enterprises more likely to be smaller, informal, and in low value-added lines of business. The challenge in expanding opportunities is not helping more women become entrepreneurs but enabling them to shift to higher return activities. A central question addressed in the book is what explains the gender sorting in the types of enterprises that women and men run? The analysis shows that many Sub-Saharan countries present a challenging environment for women. Four key areas of the agenda for expanding women’s economic opportunities in Africa are analyzed: strengthening women’s property rights and their ability to control assets; improving women’s access to finance; building human capital in business skills and networks; and strengthening women’s voices in business environment reform. These areas are important both because they have wide gender gaps and because they help explain gender differences in entrepreneurial activities. It is particularly striking that while gender gaps in education tend to close with higher incomes, gaps in women’s property rights and in women’s participation in reform processes do not. As simply raising a country’s income is unlikely to be sufficient to give women equal ability to control assets or have greater voice, more proactive steps will be needed. Practical guidelines to move the agenda forward are discussed for each of these key areas.

Why is the private sector yet to take off in much sub-Saharan Africa? Drawing on a unique set of enterprise surveys, Vijaya Ramachandran and her co-authors identify the biggest obstacles: inadequate infrastructure (especially unreliable electricity and crumbing roads) and burdensome regulation. They then show how ethnic minorities dominate the private sector in many countries, inhibiting competition and demands for a better business environment, and thus impeding the emergence of an entrepreneurial middle class. Based on this careful diagnosis, the authors suggest investing in infrastructure and reforming regulation to lower the cost of doing business, and increasing the access to education of a broader-based business class that crosses ethnic divides. Book jacket.

Sub-Saharan Africa is vastly diverse, and the 49 countries of the region range significantly in terms of population, size and economic scale. The region also differs in topography, climate, history, culture, languages and political systems. Given this vast diversity, it is, accordingly, difficult to draw general conclusions about the continent’s economic performance as a whole. Additionally, the lack of current statistics for several countries makes it difficult to make accurate assessments of economic conditions. Nevertheless, some broad comparisons can be made: of the world’s developing areas, sub-Saharan Africa has the worst record in virtually all of the most important social and economic indicators: the region has the lowest gross national income per head, the lowest life expectancy at birth, the lowest youth literacy rate, the highest rate of adult HIV infection and the highest number of children not living past five years of age. This volume begins by examining recent economic developments and trends. It then looks at the major economic constraints the region has faced in recent years, breaking down those constraints as either ‘external’ (e.g. terms of trade) over which the individual countries have but limited control, or ‘internal’ (e.g. governance and economic policy), over which there is more control. The book concludes by arguing that, despite the notable challenges cited above, sub-Saharan Africa is poised for a transformation, based on closer regional economic co-operation, a growing middle class, increased demand for locally produced goods and services, and a young population.