Publication: Digital Opportunities in African Businesses
Loading...
Files
8,883 downloads
6,543 downloads
4,370 downloads
61 downloads
68 downloads
Date
2024-05-16
ISSN
Published
2024-05-16
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Adoption of digital technologies is widely acknowledged to boost productivity and employment, stimulate investment, and promote growth and development. Africa has already benefited from a rapid diffusion of information and communications technology, characterized by the widespread adoption of mobile phones. However, access to and use of digital technology among firms is uneven in the region, varying not just among countries but also within them. Consequently, African businesses may not be reaping the full potential benefits offered by ongoing improvements in digital infrastructure. Using rich datasets, “Digital Opportunities in African Businesses” offers a new understanding of the region’s incomplete digitalization—namely, shortfalls in the adoption and effective use of digital technology by firms to perform productive tasks. The research presented here also highlights the challenges in addressing incomplete digitalization, finding that the cost of machinery, equipment, and software, as well as the cost of connectivity to the internet, is significantly more expensive in Africa than elsewhere. “Digital Opportunities in African Businesses” outlines ways in which the private sector, with support from policy makers, international institutions, and regulators, can help bring down these costs, stimulating more widespread digitalization of the region’s firms, thereby boosting productivity and, by extension, economic development. This book will be relevant to anyone with an interest in furthering digitalization across Africa.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Cruz, Marcio; . Cruz, Marcio, editors. 2024. Digital Opportunities in African Businesses. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/41447 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Digital Senegal for Inclusive Growth(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-02-03)Digital Senegal for Inclusive Growth explores possible solutions for a more intensive use of digital technologies, especially by small and medium enterprises, to increase their productivity and create more quality jobs. The report will contribute to helping women and young people in particular to gain access to decent work and therefore reduce their exposure to poverty. Appropriate use of this report will make it possible to succeed in the challenges of digital transformation, especially in the context of a relatively young population that is more open to innovation and change.Publication Developing Entrepreneurial Ecosystems for Digital Businesses and Beyond(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-10-18)An entrepreneurial ecosystem is characterized by the structure and interactions of organizations, firms, institutions, and individuals in a specific locale that is conducive to entrepreneurship. It can be defined as a set of interdependent actors and factors that are governed in such a way that they enable productive entrepreneurship in a particular territory. The World Bank has developed a new toolkit, Developing Entrepreneurial Ecosystems for Digital Businesses and Beyond, for entrepreneurial ecosystem assessments, including dedicated methodologies and data sets, to nurture digital entrepreneurship. This toolkit builds on the World Bank’s expertise in collecting and analyzing firm-level data, assessing the quality and efficiency of policies that support innovation and small and medium enterprises, and deriving insights from spatial economics to inform subnational analysis. The toolkit consists of six modules: cross-country context analysis, assessing local entrepreneurial ecosystems, digital entrepreneurship and tech start-ups, mapping public programs and intermediary organizations, digital market regulations, and policy options to support entrepreneurial ecosystems.Publication MIGA Annual Report 2011 : Insuring Investments, Ensuring Opportunities(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011)The report highlights Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency's (MIGA's) innovation, flexibility, and ability to deliver on its own modernization agenda. This year, the agency secured significant amendments to its Convention that enhances its value as a multilateral provider of political risk insurance. These amendments, approved by the Council of Governors in August, have already enabled MIGA to support projects that would not previously have been possible. In fiscal year 2011, MIGA provided $2.1 billion in new guarantee coverage a record high for the agency, and a 43 percent increase over the previous year, which indicates renewed interest in political risk-mitigation products. MIGA has shown renewed diversification and regional outreach from its support for a manufacturing plant in Iraq, to an agribusiness venture in Liberia, to a mining feasibility study in Indonesia, and to banking endeavors supporting small and medium enterprises in 14 countries. MIGA's concerted efforts to encourage foreign direct investment (FDI) into the Middle East and North Africa region have been especially important this year. This report also notes important amendments to MIGA's convention, approved by the Council of Governors, which took effect in November 2010. These historic amendments greatly enhance our ability to support clients. Now MIGA able to cover stand-alone debt and some existing investments, putting us in a better position to support investors in times of uncertainty. Clients have responded very positively to MIGA's expanded authority, which has also contributed to this year's increased business volume.Publication MIGA Annual Report 2013 : Insuring Investments, Ensuring Opportunities(Washington, DC: World Bank Group, 2013-10-11)In fiscal year 2013, Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) issued 2.8 billion dollars in investment guarantees for projects in our developing member countries. At 1.5 billion dollars, representing more than half of new business, the bulk of MIGA's guarantees issued support investments in Sub-Saharan Africa. Sixty-nine percent of new business volume this year was in complex projects in infrastructure and extractive industries, a strategic priority for the Agency. This year, 82 percent of MIGA's new volume fell into one or more of strategic priority areas: investments in the world's poorest countries, "South-South" investments, investments in conflict-affected countries, and investments in complex projects. MIGA also established the conflict-affected and fragile economies facility to further deepen support to this priority area.Publication Doing Business in the East African Community 2011(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2011)Doing business in the East African Community 2011 is a regional report that draws on the global doing business project and its database as well as the findings of doing business 2011: making a difference for entrepreneurs, the eighth in a series of annual reports investigating regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it. Doing business presents quantitative indicators on business regulations and the protection of property rights that can be compared across 183 economies from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe over time. This report presents a summary of doing business indicators for the East African Community. It focuses on five economies: Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. Data in doing business 2011 are current as of June 1, 2010. The indicators are used to analyze economic outcomes and identify what reforms have worked, where and why. The methodology for the employing workers indicators changed for doing business 2011.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Business Ready 2024(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-03)Business Ready (B-READY) is a new World Bank Group corporate flagship report that evaluates the business and investment climate worldwide. It replaces and improves upon the Doing Business project. B-READY provides a comprehensive data set and description of the factors that strengthen the private sector, not only by advancing the interests of individual firms but also by elevating the interests of workers, consumers, potential new enterprises, and the natural environment. This 2024 report introduces a new analytical framework that benchmarks economies based on three pillars: Regulatory Framework, Public Services, and Operational Efficiency. The analysis centers on 10 topics essential for private sector development that correspond to various stages of the life cycle of a firm. The report also offers insights into three cross-cutting themes that are relevant for modern economies: digital adoption, environmental sustainability, and gender. B-READY draws on a robust data collection process that includes specially tailored expert questionnaires and firm-level surveys. The 2024 report, which covers 50 economies, serves as the first in a series that will expand in geographical coverage and refine its methodology over time, supporting reform advocacy, policy guidance, and further analysis and research.Publication World Development Report 2024(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-08-01)Middle-income countries are in a race against time. Many of them have done well since the 1990s to escape low-income levels and eradicate extreme poverty, leading to the perception that the last three decades have been great for development. But the ambition of the more than 100 economies with incomes per capita between US$1,100 and US$14,000 is to reach high-income status within the next generation. When assessed against this goal, their record is discouraging. Since the 1970s, income per capita in the median middle-income country has stagnated at less than a tenth of the US level. With aging populations, growing protectionism, and escalating pressures to speed up the energy transition, today’s middle-income economies face ever more daunting odds. To become advanced economies despite the growing headwinds, they will have to make miracles. Drawing on the development experience and advances in economic analysis since the 1950s, World Development Report 2024 identifies pathways for developing economies to avoid the “middle-income trap.” It points to the need for not one but two transitions for those at the middle-income level: the first from investment to infusion and the second from infusion to innovation. Governments in lower-middle-income countries must drop the habit of repeating the same investment-driven strategies and work instead to infuse modern technologies and successful business processes from around the world into their economies. This requires reshaping large swaths of those economies into globally competitive suppliers of goods and services. Upper-middle-income countries that have mastered infusion can accelerate the shift to innovation—not just borrowing ideas from the global frontiers of technology but also beginning to push the frontiers outward. This requires restructuring enterprise, work, and energy use once again, with an even greater emphasis on economic freedom, social mobility, and political contestability. Neither transition is automatic. The handful of economies that made speedy transitions from middle- to high-income status have encouraged enterprise by disciplining powerful incumbents, developed talent by rewarding merit, and capitalized on crises to alter policies and institutions that no longer suit the purposes they were once designed to serve. Today’s middle-income countries will have to do the same.Publication World Bank Annual Report 2024(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-25)This annual report, which covers the period from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024, has been prepared by the Executive Directors of both the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Association (IDA)—collectively known as the World Bank—in accordance with the respective bylaws of the two institutions. Ajay Banga, President of the World Bank Group and Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors, has submitted this report, together with the accompanying administrative budgets and audited financial statements, to the Board of Governors.Publication South Asia Development Update, October 2024: Women, Jobs, and Growth(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-10)South Asia’s growth is on track to exceed earlier expectations, in a broad-based upturn. The region is expected to remain the fastest-growing among emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs). Several risks could upend this generally promising outlook, including extreme weather events, social unrest, and policy missteps, such as reform delays. But South Asian countries also have considerable untapped potential that could help them further boost productivity growth and employment and adapt to climate change. In particular, with about two-thirds of the region’s working-age women out of the labor force, raising female employment rates to those of men could increase per capita income by as much as one-half. Measures to accelerate job creation, remove obstacles to women working, and equalize gender rights would be more effective if combined with a shift toward social norms that looked more favorably on working women. Also, most South Asian countries rank among the EMDEs least open to global trade and investment. Greater openness could boost women’s employment, spur the growth of firms, and allow the region to take better advantage of the reshaping of global supply chains and trade. Reducing the cost of conducting business could help the region better harness large-scale remittance inflows.Publication Global Economic Prospects, January 2025(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-16)Global growth is expected to hold steady at 2.7 percent in 2025-26. However, the global economy appears to be settling at a low growth rate that will be insufficient to foster sustained economic development—with the possibility of further headwinds from heightened policy uncertainty and adverse trade policy shifts, geopolitical tensions, persistent inflation, and climate-related natural disasters. Against this backdrop, emerging market and developing economies are set to enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century with per capita incomes on a trajectory that implies substantially slower catch-up toward advanced-economy living standards than they previously experienced. Without course corrections, most low-income countries are unlikely to graduate to middle-income status by the middle of the century. Policy action at both global and national levels is needed to foster a more favorable external environment, enhance macroeconomic stability, reduce structural constraints, address the effects of climate change, and thus accelerate long-term growth and development.