Realizing Africa's Wealth: Building Inclusive Businesses for Shared Prosperity

Project Context

This report, commissioned for Endeva by UNDP's African Facility for Inclusive Markets, describes the status of inclusive business in sub-Saharan Africa and the ecosystems underlying the enterprises and entrepreneurs driving such approaches. It identifies promising opportunities in strengthening these ecosystems, enabling enterprises and entrepreneurs to build more – and stronger – inclusive businesses. While enterprises are the drivers of inclusive businesses, entrepreneurship is required of all societal actors if the surrounding ecosystems are to be developed. Local support institutions are largely absent, and building them will make it considerably easier for inclusive businesses to flourish. By building inclusive business ecosystems, Africa’s wealth can be realized, creating shared prosperity.

Project Objective

Inclusive Business Models have the best chance for success when they are implemented within a strong ecosystem of support institutions. Therefore, this project aims to better understand the existing support ecosystems for inclusive business models in Africa – and create transparency for companies operating on the African continent on what type of support they can attain, and from whom. It identifies promising opportunities in strengthening these ecosystems, enabling enterprises and entrepreneurs to build more – and stronger – inclusive businesses.

Project Output

This action-oriented project seeks to inspire and facilitate further collaboration between key actors – namely the private sector, donors, policy-makers, NGOs, investors, research and other support institutions – by delivering useable tools: a written report (available both in English and French) on the status of support mechanisms for inclusive business in Africa that highlights best practices and gaps, a series of case studies on African inclusive business models written by local researchers, and a comprehensive actor database – the “yellow pages” for inclusive business in Africa.