Publication database

How can the government promote Inclusive Business (IB) and Impact Investing (II) in Nigeria? This report makes four major policy recommendations: institutionalising support, promoting awareness, creating a financing structure, and putting in place a coordinated stimulus implementation strategy. In addition, it provides an overview on the present landscape for IB and II in Nigeria.

Foreign companies operating in a ‘host’ country’s private sector play an important role in fostering inclusive development in these nations. This PhD thesis, exploring the contributions of the Dutch private sector to inclusive development in Kenya’s three most important sectors, tea, flower and renewable energy, finds that private companies operate in a very specific context and must adapt to existing local circumstances that are often not automatically inclusive.

Population growth, rapid urbanisation, and a young population are major trends shaping the future of African agriculture. The sector must take on these issues to safeguard its future ability to produce enough food. Therefore, it is imperative to establish an integrated land management strategy by increasing organic matter, retaining moisture, and increasing the use of inorganic fertilisers. Governments must invest in technical and professional agricultural education. In addition, policies must clearly support family farming and the facilitation of private sector intervention via inclusive business models.

The report builds off the 2015 Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) study, The Landscape for Impact Investing in West Africa. Nigeria and Ghana represented more than half (54%) of impact investing capital in the region, with Nigeria receiving 29% and Ghana receiving 25% of the capital deployed. This 2019 study seeks to understand the extent to which investor experience, deal flow, and outlook have evolved since 2015 and policy has enabled or inhibited impact investing, and in turn to propose policy recommendations that address the issues identified.

This 2019 edition of Africa’s Development Dynamics explores policies for productive transformation in Africa. It proposes three main policy focus for transforming firms: providing business services to clusters of firms; developing regional production networks; and improving exporting firms’ ability to thrive in fast-changing markets.

There are large productivity differences across firms in developing countries, even within the same sector and region. Understanding what contributes to such differences in productivity is important for designing policies to help low productivity firms grow.

Commendable progress has been made across many parts of Africa over the past years to increase agricultural productivity, reduce hunger, malnutrition, and poverty, create new employment opportunities for young people and improve the livelihoods of rural communities. Yet, demographic change, urbanization, shifting diets and climatic changes mean that pressure is growing on food systems to make more food and more varied and nutritious food available and accessible.  How African countries position themselves to harness and deploy digital technologies will determine the future competitiveness of African agriculture and its contribution to African economies.

The current report — Byte by byte: policy innovation for transforming Africa’s food system with digital technologies— summarizes the key findings of a systematic analysis of what seven African countries at the forefront of progress on digitalization of the agriculture sector have done right. It analyzes which institutional and policy innovations were implemented and which actions by the private sector and agtech start-ups were taken to increase the development and use of digital tools and services in the agriculture value chain. The objective of this report is to identify interventions that work and benefit farmers and other actors in the value chain and recommend options for policy and program innovation that allow countries to develop a digitalization ecosystem in which digital technologies and services can be developed and used to foster growth and competitiveness in Africa’s agriculture value chains.