A few months back, President Trump referred to African nations as “shithole countries”. It is also alleged that, in an Oval Office meeting about immigration he said that Nigerians “live in mud huts.” His remarks are crude and offensive, but they also miss the vibrant economic engine the continent has become.
In sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, growth in 2018 is forecast by the World Bank to be 3.1%, rising to 3.6% next year. If you exclude the “big three” – Nigeria (2.5%), South Africa (1.1%), and Angola (1.6%), where oil prices and other special factors come into play – it’s closer to 5%. And the 3.1% average for all 49 nations obscures an even more interesting statistic – Africa hosts six of the world’s ten fastest growing economies:
“Most of 2018’s top performers are non-commodity intensive economies. The list is led by Ghana (8.3%) … Ethiopia (8.2%), Côte d’Ivoire (7.2%), Djibouti (7%), Senegal (6.9%) and Tanzania (6.8%).”
For comparison: while the US just announced an annual growth rate of 4.1%, according to a recent Bloomberg report it’s likely a blip (driven by the short-term impact of tax reform and anticipation of a trade war); the recent norm has been around 2%. The latest UK figure is a miserly 1.2%.
The African game-changer has been the mobile phone. By 2019, according to the World Economic Forum report, there will be 930 million mobile phones in Africa, which works out at almost one for per person: “There is greater mobile penetration than electricity penetration. Now, people are able to connect, get news, trade, get access to healthcare and even transfer money.”
It may seem counter-intuitive, but could the lack of traditional infrastructure actually be enabling this? I put this to Dr. Nagy Hanna, global innovation guru and former head of strategy with the World Bank.1 “That’s half the story. But yes – there are no legacy systems. There are mobile-based systems. Moving fast to a cashless society.” So what’s the other half? “The other story that is promising is the development of innovation hubs. Mostly in South Africa but also Kenya, Ghana – they’re not evenly spread.”
Innovation hubs in the West have historically been funded by venture capital. The most famous is Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator that has nursed a succession of star starts-ups including DropBox and AirBnB.
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