Publication database

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.

The African Impact Report 2019 is a catalyst for collaborative coordination amongst global stakeholders to fast track sustainable and scalable solutions for Africa’s prioritized impact needs. This working paper presents a baseline of the progress pertaining to the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals and the African Union (AU) Agenda 2063, macroeconomic growth prospects, capital availability and sector opportunities. It further outlines gaps which require a collaborative effort to address in order to ensure the much needed outcomes for the African continent is achieved.

This study adopts the human capital theory to investigate the contingent relationship between human capital and entrepreneurial orientation in explaining radical product innovations, using a sample of small-scale carpentry workshops in Nairobi, Kenya. It provides conclusions of the study and highlights relevant managerial and policy implications.

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.

Women play a key role in the economies of sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, sub-Saharan Africa is the only region where women make up the majority of those who are entrepreneurs. However, a range of impediments render women’s businesses less productive and having fewer employees than those owned by men. This new report seeks to focus attention on the challenges that Africa’s women entrepreneurs face and identify practical solutions. The report draws on new, high-quality, household and firm level data to present the clearest evidence to date about the barriers to growth and profitability faced by women entrepreneurs.The report offers policy makers evidencebased guidance on designing programs to target multiple obstacles and improve the performance of women entrepreneurs.  

This Discussion Paper provides examples of how a systems approach can be applied at a city level by looking at two cities – Lusaka, Zambia and Maputo, Mozambique – that have experienced positive change in their on-site sanitation sector over the last decade.

Africa has long been on the frontier of the global investment landscape and still accounts for a small share of the world economy. But looking ahead, we see a range of fundamental supports for economic activity and prospective investment returns on the continent. This reports outlines the growth story in sub-Saharan Africa and begin to uncover some of the key investment themes that are developing across the region.

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.