Private Equity in South and Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Over the past few years, optimism about Africa’s economic prospects has grown. Six of the top ten fastest-growing economies in the world have been African during the period 2002–2011, and over that time Africa has grown more rapidly than East Asia (The Economist, 2011). Seventeen economies—ranging from Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Mali in West Africa to Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda in East Africa to island states such as Cape Verde, Mauritius, Sao Tome and Principe, and Seychelles, and Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zambia in southern Africa—have grown on average by 3.2 percent per annum from 1996 to 2008, offering a contrast to the mainstream view of the region as war- and disease-ridden, ill governed, and stagnant (Radelet, 2010). A growing middle class, improving telecommunications, 30 peaceful transfers of power, and rapidly expanding foreign direct investment—increasingly from China—are contributing to this growth-fueled trend.