4 ms·
As an African, I can tell you the biggest issue for investment on the continent is governmental leadership. The incumbent governments tend to hold a large amoun
by michaelscott 8y ago
As an African, I can tell you the biggest issue for investment on the continent is governmental leadership. The incumbent governments tend to hold a large amount of unilateral legal power and generally don't wield it well when it comes to economics (exceptions to this would be a lot of legislation from Kigame in Rwanda, and Mauritius).
Assuming this was fixed, though, I would recommend looking into infrastructure and technology products and services, especially those that are homegrown. These are what most countries need the most and the potential for their growth would be tremendous given the continent's population size.
- kazen44 8y ago> Assuming this was fixed, though, I would recommend looking into infrastructure and technology products and services, especially those that are homegrown. These are what most countries need the most and the potential for their growth would be tremendous given the continent's population size. infrastructure in africa is weird though, most of it goes from the resource rich lands to some port for export. There is very little infrastructure between african nations in comparison, which hurts inter-african trade a lot, because it usually results in exporting to other countries being cheaper and using the resources to grow the trade between african nations. Having an internal market (like the EU common market) allows for massive growth of the economies of different nations, it's a shame infrastructure for it does not exist (yet).
- michaelscott 8y agoAbsolutely. There is an African Union (AU), but it is a largely toothless organisation in practice and there is little real collaboration between nations on the continent. Again, it comes to leadership. Rwanda, as an example, has great business legislation but being a small, landlocked country it will be reliant on good legislation from its neighbours too in order to really blossom, and sadly this is largely missing.
- mh400 8y agoTotally agree that technology products/services have significant role to play in Africa, especially as we have leapfrogged lines and gone direct to mobile. I think the key point as you highlighted is is that its is homegrown - it took me a while to unlearn/adjust my approach when introducing data-focused products to in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
- cryoshon 8y agoas an aside, how do you think governmental leadership relates to the informal nature of many of africa's economies? i ask because one of the issues that india's legislators have is to create policies which can intelligently regulate a largely off-the-books economy. the results end up looking stupid and not being effective a lot of the time.
- michaelscott 8y agoI don't know much about Indian government, but the problem with African governments is they tend to operate on a selfish basis, i.e. their legislation is designed around improving public employees (including top leadership) to the detriment of the population. When the government's legislation is sometimes actively against your welfare as a citizen, I imagine you're much more likely to have off-the-books and informal business. Again, the lack of infrastructure in many places requires citizens to work around these problems and the larger sense of community in most African cultures also makes an informal economy more likely. These are just anecdotal opinions, though, so take it with a large pinch of salt.
- cryoshon 8y agovery interesting, thank you for taking the time to respond to me.