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Growing a Business in a Growing Industry

Sub-Saharan Africa contains 11 % of the world's population but bears 24 % of the global disease burden¹ (World Bank). A recent the International Finance Corporation (IFC) study, with McKinsey, estimat...

Housing public-private partnerships in Latin America: lessons from Mexico and elsewhere

The complex challenge of building a home loans market in Ghana

Inadequate real-estate supply and the absence of a deep capital market have hampered the development of the home loans market in Ghana. The rapid success of Ghana Home Loans, which now provides nearly...

Regulated rental sector can meet the urban housing challenge

Governments in developing countries have rightly promoted homeownership as a way of alleviating poverty. But, faced with rapid population growth and the prospect of millions ending up in slums, they m...

A new generation of real-estate developers focusing on low-income housing

Developers who want to enter India's affordable housing market face many obstacles. But with an estimated market value of USD 245 billion, the sector is attracting growing interest. Tata Housing, one...

Housing the world: leveraging private-sector resources for the public good

By 2030, around 3 billion people in the developing world will need housing. That means 565 million new units, adding to the current gap of more than 400 million homes. Building these will provide much...

Developing renewable energies in Africa: a public-private partnership

Likewise mobile phone for telecommunication, is sub-Saharan Africa on the verge to leapfrog conventional energy and move straight to renewable energy (RE)1 to address requirements for capacity additio...

Mining, the key to unlocking Africa's independent power producer markets

The size of power needs in most African countries and the investment required limits the number of projects that can realistically be funded in-country. The private sector could help, particularly whe...

Improving air transport efficiency in Africa

The opportunities presented by air transport are particularly relevant to Africa, however the sector is hampered by lingering over-dependence on governments, supervisory bodies that are often ineffici...

Tourism in Africa: a priceless resource with untapped potential

Although there has been a significant increase in tourism in Africa, the sector’s abundant potential remains largely untapped on the continent. Mossadeck Bally gives an overview of the challenges and...

Financial sector in Africa: training the next generation of managers

For investors in financial institutions in Africa and other developing economies, a lack of managerial capacity is particularly evident in the “post-expatriate” phase – the moment when local capacity...

Acting sustainably to promote African small business: The challenge facing mission investors

Africa is the new frontier for private equity, yet the region is having trouble channelling the corresponding financial flows to its woefully underfunded small businesses. The continent cannot adequat...

Social business: the challenge of scaling up

Entrepreneurship can meet the needs of “base-of-the-pyramid” populations, provided the business in question has reached the critical size needed for profitability and sustainability. Examples of “incl...

Palmis Enèji: from NGO to enterprise - the story of a social business in Haiti

In 2012, the French NGO EDM launched a programme to distribute Palmis Enèji cooking and lighting appliances to meet energy demand among the poorest sections of the Haitian population. Two years ago, t...

The diversity of social business: the case of Madagascar

Despite a troubled macroeconomic and political environment, Madagascar possesses a fairly diversified, dynamic economic fabric in comparison to other countries with a similar level of development. Thi...

Access to quality sanitation in kenyan slums: Sanergy's model

Sanergy strives to leverage the entire sanitation value chain to create vibrant micro-businesses in informal settlements and by-products that can be marketed to Kenyan farmers. Hazardous waste is remo...

The ambitious and challenges of social business - Better definiting and structuring the sector

Social business is a demanding business model: social enterprises pursue social or environmental goals while also seeking long-term profitability and they face many challenges. In the wide- ranging ‘i...

Sub-Saharan Africa: Growth also depends on the funding of affordable housing

Well-functioning areas are a key issue for Africa’s development. The housing sector, with the construction of millions of affordable homes for the masses in Africa, represents a major challenge but al...

The Big Bang in Big Data: an opportunity for African urban policies

Each day, our intensive use of information technologies generates trillions of data bytes termed “Big Data”. Some big data has a high socio-behavioural value and may therefore be of use in producing d...

Teaching teachers: first steps in improving education in Sub-Saharan Africa

Elun is a nonprofit providing free teacher education to schools in the developing world with a number of ongoing projects in Rwanda, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Tanzania. This article presents Elun’s id...