 Long overlooked by the world's investment community, all the signs point to a turning of the corner for Africa.
The continent's gross domestic product (GDP) growth has been rising steadily since 1989 and, according to the latest International Monetary Fund (IMF) projections, will marginally exceed the global GDP growth average of 4.5 percent for 2005. For 2006, the IMF is projecting growth of 5.9 percent in GDP for Sub-Saharan Africa, the strongest forecast in 35 years. Granted, Africa's current growth rates come off a low base, but there is cause for optimism about the continent's prospects for achieving sustainable long-term growth. Over the past decade, many of Africa's 54 countries have introduced structural reform, overhauled their domestic macroeconomic policies and acknowledged the need for private sector-led investment. Political reform, although tentative in some cases, is gaining ground and only a handful of nations still tolerate dictatorships or military regimes. Peace has been reached in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Sierra Leone after decades-long civil strife and, overall, there has been a marked decrease in armed conflict across Africa. Investor concerns over difficult business conditions, particularly around regulatory transparency and effective governance, remain valid but progress is being made. At the last count, 22 African nations had voluntarily agreed to have their economic and political governance assessed through the African Peer Review mechanism of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), the continent-wide revitalisation initiative. These positive developments are reawakening investor interest in Africa, as is the concurrent oil boom on the continent and the expected increase in production capacity in countries such as Nigeria, Angola and Mauritania. Non-oil producing countries are also benefiting from solid global demand for other mineral products. This is just the impetus needed to stimulate growth and allow Africa to pull itself up by its own bootstraps. Of course, Africa cannot move directly from poverty to a consumer-led economy. This is why, as a resource-rich region, the continent must identify and capitalise on resource-led catalysts and move into beneficiation. Another imperative for building a larger, more affluent African consumer base is to extend and strengthen financial services infrastructure to cater for the masses of unbanked Africans, especially in the large, low end of the market. For some time now, Accenture has been actively assisting resources and financial services clients to perform in the African market. Many of these clients are South African-based. South Africa continues to be the biggest investor into Africa, with the emphasis on banking, mining, telecommunications and, to a lesser but increasing extent, consumer retailing. To support clients' investment in Africa, we have grown our operations in strategically located countries, including Nigeria, Angola, Botswana and Mauritius. Our Mauritius and Nigeria operations are the oldest and largest, aside from South Africa, with 600 and 200 employees respectively, based in these countries. The Botswana and Angola operations were established as recently as 2005. Where necessary, as in the case of consulting projects for global clients, additional resources are sourced into the African operations from Accenture locations around the world. We are also able to offer our clients in Africa access to the resources of our global alliance partners, including SAP, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. However, our business model takes into account the need to harness African skills when doing business on the continent, hence the extensive use of local resources in the countries where we operate. This extends beyond employing local people and includes teaming up with local project partners with proven track records in their fields. In every African country in which we are helping our clients to become high-performance governments and businesses, Accenture is leveraging the benefits of global expertise combined with local insight. To Top |