Africans changing Africa: Signs of hope emerge

The 'cheetah generation'
But Asmah says the odds of success in Africa are greater than anywhere else, including America.

Asmah is part of what economist Ayittey calls Africa’s “cheetah generation” — young entrepreneurs who are fast, smart, adaptable and ready to tackle Africa’s problems. Eventually — and it will take time — he predicts the cheetahs could overtake the bureaucrats and dictators who blame Africa’s problems on colonialism and don’t address them.

It is already happening in Ghana. Democracy is strong, and the economy is growing by 6 percent a year. The World Bank recently praised Ghana as one of the leading business reformers in the world. Ghana’s debt is down by more than two-thirds, and inflation is under control.

Economic stability in turn draws investment. Foreign investment in Africa rose to a record $39 billion in 2006 from $31 billion just a year earlier, only partly because of oil revenues.

“It’s a young economy and anyone who looks into that will see that Ghana is a safe terrain to be in,” notes Asmah, who says his business exceeds $1 million a year in revenue and brings profits of 30 percent. “Returns on investment here are 20 percent higher than anywhere else.”

'Black diamonds' emerge
Accra’s first suburbs sprawl northward from the Atlantic Ocean, low-slung bungalows that stretch out on generous plots surrounded by high brick walls. Wide roads are laid out in a perfect grid. The neighborhood is in various stages of construction, but the shade trees around the more established homes hint at its future charm.

Mavis Boayke, 30, shares one of the new four-bedroom, cream-colored bungalows with her banker husband, her four-month-old son and her mother. Every workday morning, she climbs into a taxi for the 45-minute drive into her office in town.

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Boayke is a department head at Type Company who supervises the digital graphic design team. The daughter of a poor civil servant laborer, she spent two years of mandatory government service producing drawings for Ministry of Health brochures. Afterward, she went straight to work because she could not afford university.

Now Type Company is paying $800 a month for her to go to university part-time, and she lives a solidly middle-class life. She and her husband watch Christian satellite television on a Sony Corp. home theater system. They shop at a new mall. They eat pizza at a South African fast food chain, and belong to a middle class sometimes nicknamed “black diamonds.”

“I am making three times or four times what my father was making, and sometimes he looks at me and marvels and says, ‘I am happy you are doing well in life,”’ Boayke says.

Boayke is an example of how wealth from companies is slowly trickling down through communities, in a part of the world where each worker supports six people on average.

In 2000, Africa’s middle class of 12.7 million people made up just 2 percent of the population, according to the World Bank. By 2030, it is expected to more than triple to 43 million, or 4 percent of the population.

Overwhelmingly poor continent
However, Africa remains overwhelmingly poor. Ten percent of the world’s poor people now live in Africa, and that is expected to rise to 13 percent in the next 25 years.

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The best hope for the poor could be private enterprise, which creates 90 percent of the jobs in developing countries. But business is dragged down by a lack of education, unreliable power, bad roads, disease and a long list of other problems.

Choking bureaucracy means that it takes 95 days to start a business in Tanzania, 138 days in Ghana and 177 days in Chad. In Australia, it takes one day.

Recently, African countries have begun to cut business costs and red tape, according to the World Bank. Ghana lowered corporate taxes and slashed paperwork at customs. Tanzania has reduced the cost of starting a business by 40 percent. Kenya is simplifying its business licenses.

Boayke has been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug herself.

“The plan is that in three years, I will start something on my own,” she says. “My husband wants me to start now because he thinks I will make more money, but I think I need to make more contacts before I start.”

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