Summary and Conclusion

Chapter eleven summarizes the book’s message and focus. It makes concluding remarks on emerging business opportunities, market entry, competitive strategies, and foreign direct investments in the continent. It further states the compelling imperatives of doing business in Africa today.

Doing Business in Africa and African Business Opportunities

This is a key chapter in this book. It is central to the book’s message and explains fully the concept “doing business in Africa.” The chapter further classifies African business opportunities into enabling and specific opportunities. Specific opportunities are precise areas of Foreign Direct investments. The enabling opportunities are resources and institutions that make investing and doing business in Africa possible and easier. These resources and institutions include USA, European, Chinese, Brazilian, and Indian strategies to promote investment and “doing business in Africa.” These strategies further include linkages and several USA, European, Indian, Brazilian, and Chinese institutions focusing on promoting African trade and business. Moreover, the various perspectives of Foreign Direct Investment in Africa are elucidated and African countries are classified according to their economic development and performance levels.

A Model for Doing Business in Africa

The chapter focuses on developing a business and competitive model to create and successfully manage a business in Africa. This includes strategic positioning of a firm in a market, corporate-level and competitive strategies that firms need to develop in order to successfully create a sustainable competitive advantage in the industries, and market segments they will compete in. Strategy and strategic management are defined and described fully. The perspectives and paradigms of formulation, implementation, and evaluation of a strategic intent are fully explored and covered here including determining the sources of a sustainable competitive advantage for a firm in an industry through the creation of a variety of competitive advantages.

The Perspectives of African History

Anecdotally this chapter describes several perspectives of African history. These historical perspectives include the slavery period, the colonial period, the post-independence period, and the so called structural adjustments and reforms period. The consequences and impact of what happened, during each of these periods, on Africa, are analyzed. Therefore, the chapter gives the origins of the continent’s current social, economic, political, and business circumstances. Moreover, a discussion is developed on how to overcome the negative effects of these circumstances in order to create more and enhance existing economic and business opportunities in the continent.

The African Regional Integration and Trading Blocs

This chapter is perhaps the most important and significant chapter in the book. This is because of the great importance attached to increasing regional integration and trade as an enlargement of regional markets. The chapter focuses on the perspectives of international trade as a foundation for regional integration, regional integration schemes and their processes, and the African regional integration and its regional trading blocs. The trading blocs are meant to enlarge African markets and to be pillars and building blocks of the African economic community. The chapter also examines the importance of proximities—geographic, economic, political, and administrative—in helping to promote regional trade. Regional trade has grown faster than international trade in the last five decades, and successful regional trading countries are the wealthiest in the world today. Those with low or limited regional trade—like countries in the African and the Middle East regions—are the poorest countries today. The seven major African trading blocs are fully described in the chapter.

Overcoming the Challenges of Doing Business in Africa

This chapter presents a framework and suggests specific strategies to eliminate or minimize the impact of the environmental micro-challenges when doing business in Africa. The minimization of these challenges will most likely attract increased Foreign Direct Investments to Africa. The chapter discusses twenty different policy and strategic initiatives that can make Africa an attractive business region. It also thoroughly explains how effective application of these strategies has helped other regions or countries with emerging economies such as China, India, and Brazil to grow phenomenally in the last three decades.

Challenges of Doing Business in Africa

This chapter enumerates and discusses fully the challenges of doing business in Africa. Other scholars (Ortiz, 2010) have described these challenges or environmental factors as a framework consisting of Social, Legal, Economic, Political, and Technological (SLEPT) conditions of a country for investment purposes. This framework, when combined with an appropriate granular measures model, proves useful to multinational companies, governments, individuals, and international organizations at the time to assist them in making strategic decisions and establishing investment priorities in Africa. Moreover, this chapter goes into the micro-level and looks at specific environmental factors that create challenges to the exploitation of African business opportunities. From that point of view, it reviews and explains concrete strategies to create business pathways in Africa.

A Strategic Model for Entering African Markets

This chapter looks at managerial mind-set and cultural orientations as major dimensions to be considered in global business. Furthermore, the chapter elucidates sites and market entry evaluation criterion, including identification and discussion of foreign markets’ entry modes and synergies created by various modes. It further analyzes the global and African markets’ specific entry strategies to do business in Africa. It also examines appropriate timing in market entry including risks and challenges in entering foreign markets—particularly African markets—to do business.

The Rising and Compelling Imperatives to do Business in Africa

This chapter identifies and describes the current rising and compelling imperatives of doing business in Africa. It defines Africa’s market attractiveness and the African Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—the sum of the value of goods and services that a nation produces in a year—and the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) both as measures of market size and market intensity in the African economies. It also outlines the origins of the concept of PPP, its uses together with GDP, and the strengths and the limitations of the PPP as a currency exchange rate determinant and as a market size and market intensity measure, hence business opportunities.

Africa in the Global Economy

This chapter describes concepts and perspectives of globalization generally and explains Africa’s current and anticipated position in the global economy. The chapter further enumerates and fully explains the economic and business strategies that are necessary to increase the competitiveness of African economies in the global markets. By increasing Africa’s competitiveness, the continent will become an attractive business region for the urgently needed foreign direct investments.