Unlocking Africa's Business Potential

Unlocking Africa's Business Potential
Author: Landry Signe
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2020-04-07
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0815737394

Africa welcomes business investment and offers some of the world's highest returns and impacts Africa has tremendous economic potential and offers rewarding opportunities for global businesses looking for new markets and long-term investments with favorable returns. Africa has been one of the world's fastest-growing regions over the past decade, and by 2030 will be home to nearly 1.7 billion people and an estimated $6.7 trillion worth of consumer and business spending. Increased political stability in recent years and improving regional integration are making market access easier, and business expansion will generate jobs for women and youth, who represent the vast majority of the population. Current economic growth and poverty-alleviation efforts mean that more than 43 percent of the continent's people will reach middle- or upper-class status by 2030. Unlocking Africa's Business Potential examines business opportunities in the eight sectors with the highest potential returns on private investment—the same sectors that will foster economic growth and diversification, job creation, and improved general welfare. These sectors include: consumer markets, agriculture and agriprocessing, information and communication technology, manufacturing, oil and gas, tourism, banking, and infrastructure and construction. The book's analysis of these sectors is based on case studies that identify specific opportunities for investment and growth, along with long-term market projections to inform decision-making. The book identifies potential risks to business and offers mitigation strategies. It also provides policymakers with solutions to attract new business investments, including how to remove barriers to business and accelerate development of the private sector.

Scholarly Publishing in Africa

Scholarly Publishing in Africa
Author: Solani Ngobeni
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2010
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0798302275

Sadly, the same cannot be said about scholarly publishing which to all intents and purposes continues to remain the flotsam and jetsam of the African publishing landscape. --

China’s Trade and Investment in Africa

China’s Trade and Investment in Africa
Author: Alpha Furbell Lisimba
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2020-12-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9811595739

The core argument of this book is that China poses both challenges and creates opportunities for Africa, and that the transformative potentials of China-Africa engagements can be compared to Africa’s experiences with European colonialism. However, it would be patently misleading to claim any equivalence between African experiences of European colonialism with Africa’s engagements with China. Although, China does not replicate the exact colonial model, its actions have all elements of dependent relations, thus underpinning neo-colonialism with Chinese characteristics. Analysing China’s growing economic relations with Africa, this book posits that, Africa’s underdevelopment situation with China does not indicate a significant point of departure from the colonial model of development because China’s actions in Africa, although not exactly colonial, have all possibilities of Neocolonialist model with Chinese characteristics. As such the author argues that China’s increasing trade, FDI inflow and influence on the economic growth and development in Africa will result in a long-term negative impact in development outcomes and capacity building, governance practice, democratic transition and human rights for future self-reliance and sustainable development.

Encyclopedia of African Literature

Encyclopedia of African Literature
Author: Simon Gikandi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1009
Release: 2003-09-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134582226

The most comprehensive reference work on African literature to date, this book covers all the key historical and cultural issues in the field. The Encyclopedia contains over 600 entries covering criticism and theory, African literature's development as a field of scholarship, and studies of established and lesser-known writers and their texts. While the greatest proportion of literary work in Africa has been a product of the twentieth century, the Encyclopedia also covers the literature back to the earliest eras of story-telling and oral transmission, making this a unique and valuable resource for those studying social sciences as well as humanities. This work includes cross-references, suggestions for further reading, and a comprehensive index.

A Fistful of Shells

A Fistful of Shells
Author: Toby Green
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 651
Release: 2019-03-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 022664474X

By the time the “Scramble for Africa” among European colonial powers began in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for centuries. Its gold had fueled the economies of Europe and the Islamic world for nearly a millennium, and the sophisticated kingdoms spanning its west coast had traded with Europeans since the fifteenth century. Until at least 1650, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of currencies—most importantly, cowrie shells imported from the Maldives and nzimbu shells imported from Brazil. But, as the slave trade grew, African kingdoms began to lose prominence in the growing global economy. We have been living with the effects of this shift ever since. With A Fistful of Shells, Toby Green transforms our view of West and West-Central Africa by reconstructing the world of these kingdoms, which revolved around trade, diplomacy, complex religious beliefs, and the production of art. Green shows how the slave trade led to economic disparities that caused African kingdoms to lose relative political and economic power. The concentration of money in the hands of Atlantic elites in and outside these kingdoms brought about a revolutionary nineteenth century in Africa, parallel to the upheavals then taking place in Europe and America. Yet political fragmentation following the fall of African aristocracies produced radically different results as European colonization took hold. Drawing not just on written histories, but on archival research in nine countries, art, oral history, archaeology, and letters, Green lays bare the transformations that have shaped world politics and the global economy since the fifteenth century and paints a new and masterful portrait of West Africa, past and present.

The State of Scholarly Publishing

The State of Scholarly Publishing
Author: Harold Laski
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1351473379

For decades, university presses and other scholarly and professional publishers in the United States played a pivotal role in the transmission of scholarly knowledge. Their books and journals became the "gold standard" in many academic fields for tenure, promotion, and merit pay. Their basic business model was successful, since this diverse collection of presses had a unique value proposition. They dominated the scholarly publishing field with preeminent sales in three major markets or channels of distribution: libraries and institutions; college and graduate school adoptions; and general readers (i.e., sales to general retailers).Yet this insulated world changed abruptly in the late 1990s. What happened? This book contains a superb series of articles originally published in The Journal of Scholarly Publishing, by some of the best experts on scholarly communication in the western hemisphere, Europe, Asia, and Africa. These authors analyze in depth the diverse and exciting challenges and opportunities scholars, universities, and publishers face in what is a period of unusual turbulence in scholarly publishing.The topics given attention include: copyrights, the transformation of scholarly publishing from a print format to a digital one, open access, scholarly publishing in emerging nations, problems confronting journals, and information on how certain academic disciplines are coping with the transformation of scholarly publishing. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the scholarly publishing industry's past, its current focus, or future plans and developments.

Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800

Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800
Author: John Thornton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 483
Release: 1998-04-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 113964338X

This book explores Africa's involvement in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century. It focuses especially on the causes and consequences of the slave trade, in Africa, in Europe, and in the New World. African institutions, political events, and economic structures shaped Africa's voluntary involvement in the Atlantic arena before 1680. Africa's economic and military strength gave African elites the capacity to determine how trade with Europe developed. Thornton examines the dynamics of colonization which made slaves so necessary to European colonizers, and he explains why African slaves were placed in roles of central significance. Estate structure and demography affected the capacity of slaves to form a self-sustaining society and behave as cultural actors, transferring and transforming African culture in the New World.

What works in early reading materials

What works in early reading materials
Author: Ana Robledo
Publisher: RTI Press
Total Pages: 50
Release: 2019-02-25
Genre: Education
ISBN:

Access to books is key to learning to read and sustaining a love of reading. Yet many low- and middle-income countries struggle to provide their students with reading materials of sufficient quality and quantity. Since 2008, RTI International has provided technical assistance in early reading assessment and instruction to ministries of education in dozens of low- and middle-income countries. The central objective of many of these programs has been to improve learning outcomes—in particular, reading—for students in the early grades of primary school. Under these programs, RTI has partnered with ministry staff to produce and distribute evidence-based instructional materials at a regional or national scale, in quantities that increase the likelihood that children will have ample opportunities to practice reading skills, and at a cost that can be sustained in the long term by the education system. In this paper, we seek to capture the practices RTI has developed and refined over the last decade, particularly in response to the challenges inherent in contexts with high linguistic diversity and low operational capacity for producing and distributing instructional materials. These practices constitute our approach to developing and producing instructional materials for early grade literacy. We also touch upon effective planning for printing and distribution procurement, but we do not consider the printing and distribution processes in depth in this paper. We expect this volume will be useful for donors, policymakers, and practitioners interested in improving access to cost-effective, high-quality teaching and learning materials for the early grades.