Table Of ContentContents
Acknowledgements
Foreword: Africa Unbound
Introduction: The Fastest Billion and $29 Trillion
PART I: From Last to Fast
Chapter 1: Getting Macro Right
Chapter 2: A Trajectory of Promise, 2012–2050
Chapter 3: Counting Accountability: A Maturing Democratic Culture
Chapter 4: Unleashing the Private Sector
Chapter 5: Banking on Human Capital
PART II: The Massai Market Moment
Chapter 6: Oil and Gas in the African Boom
Chapter 7: Mining: The Growth Has Barely Begun
Chapter 8: The World’s Biggest Demographic Dividend
Chapter 9: African Banking: The Revolution Is Now
PART III: The Great Leap
Chapter 10: Technology and Timing
Chapter 11: Infrastructure: The Beauty of Starting Afresh
Chapter 12: Urbanisation: A Virtuous Circle
Chapter 13: Agriculture: The Coming Harvest
Chapter 14: The Myth of the Equator
Chapter 15: Conclusion: This Is Africa’s Moment
Index
Acknowledgements
This in-depth, on-the-ground look at Africa’s economic revolution resulted
from a decision by Renaissance Group in 2005 to grow beyond its home markets
of Russia and the CIS, to Africa. In seven years, the Firm has established seven
offices across Africa and invested over $1bn of its own capital in the continent.
The centrepiece of our investment has been the people – over 180 on the ground
in Africa – who work for the Group and its businesses. This book would not
have been possible without the groundwork they have laid and knowledge base
they have created in order to support the team of economists, analysts and other
Renaissance experts who contributed to this book.
As this is Renaissance Group’s first book, there is no shortage of people to
thank for their inspiration, wisdom and guidance as we created a narrative from
the 2,500 research reports we prepared on Africa since 2005.
Stephen Jennings, the founder and CEO of Renaissance Group, took that
fateful decision seven years ago to hitch up our business to Africa’s coming
growth and gamble that the long-term strength of the Firm lay in diversity, and
in Africa. He was right.
Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are
Failing and What Can Be Done About It, pioneered recent research into Africa
and gave us inspiration for our title.
The Renaissance Capital Research team and its editors Michiko Fox, Mark
Porter and Abigail Mauldin run a 24/7 operation across several continents,
perfecting the impressive output of dozens of the best emerging-markets
analysts.
We are grateful to Preston Mendenhall, Alexandra Waldman, Sergey Turov,
Daria Khilenkova, Sabir Aliev, Natalia Pchelintseva, Ivan Aleshin, Svetlana
Mitina, Lyudmila Bibina and Olesya Latyshko for engineering the project.
Brunswick Group has provided strategic advice to Renaissance Group for many
years. Sally Tickner supplied invaluable publishing-industry insight. Richard
Walker and Duncan Robertson lent their editing prowess to our work.
We are indebted to Her Excellency Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, Coordinating
Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Federal Republic of Nigeria,
for contributing the foreword to The Fastest Billion.
The entire Renaissance Group team is thankful to their families for their
tolerance of frequent absences, during the compilation of this book and as part of
our work for one of the most hard-charging and innovative emerging-markets
firms in the world.
Accra, Harare, Johannesburg, Lagos, Lubumbashi, Lusaka, Nairobi and London
October 2012
Foreword
Africa Unbound
By Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
I
magine a continent torn by multiple wars, beset by ethnic and religious
warfare, malnutrition, disease and illiteracy – all of it complicated by poorly
drawn borders, a still potent post-colonial stigma and the incessant meddling of
outside powers.
With a single exception, per capita income hovers at $400, primary school
education reaches only a fraction of the region’s vast population, and its
authoritarian rulers ensure any revenue generated by the region’s rich natural
resources is spent on personal, rather than national priorities. Prospects for
pulling the multitudes who live at, or just above, subsistence levels seem remote,
at best.
Too many readers will by now have concluded that the continent referred to
above is my own, Africa. In fact, while Sub-Saharan Africa has suffered the
same problems in recent decades, the region described above is Developing Asia
in the mid-1970s: an area of the world that had endured 200 years of decline,
imperial domination and economic stagnation before beginning on the path that
would transform it into the most economically vibrant zone on Earth.
Just as SSA has suffered through its despots and destitution, so the seedlings
of transformation have pushed through the African soil. As an increasing number
of economists, investors and financial policymakers have realised, SSA has
emerged from its own malaise, into a dawn that promises growth to rival, if not
surpass, that recorded by Asia’s ’Tigers’ over the past two decades.
Indeed, as Charles Robertson and his Renaissance Capital colleagues point
out in The Fastest Billion: The Story Behind Africa’s Economic Revolution, the
macro-economic, demographic and geopolitical picture below the Sahel today
bears a strong resemblance to the start of East Asia’s climb in the early 1980s,
when emerging-market powerhouses like India, South Korea, Malaysia and
Indonesia were still regarded as basket cases by many in the so-called First
World: more likely to be targets for development aid and pedantic lectures than
long-term investment. Yet what portfolio manager today would not love to be
able to say, ‘And, of course, we were overweight Asia back when the Tigers
were mere cubs.’
It is the argument of this book that the best-performing nations of SSA today
are poised for their own historic period of growth, driven not just by the
continent’s rich and still largely untapped natural resources, but also its growing
domestic strengths, its agricultural potential and its unique internal dynamism.
With over a billion people, national economies of increasing sophistication and
openness, vaulting improvements in governance, health and education, and the
distinction of being the fastest-growing region on the planet, Africa will indeed
claim its due, and global capital markets will play a vital role.
Much has been made in the West of the enormous sums China has invested
in African economies over the past decade. In some cases, this natural desire by
Beijing and other emerging powers to find new markets for their products while
buying raw materials for their booming economies has been cast in
conspiratorial, even Cold War terms. This is vastly overdone, to my mind.
In fact, emerging markets and developing countries are contributing more to
global growth than they ever did – 60 percent or more – and their seemingly
disproportionate activities in Africa are part of this trend. In many developing
countries, the biggest investors are now other developing countries, and not just
China, but India, Singapore, Russia, Brazil and others. China, in particular, often
includes massive infrastructure improvements in its commercial dealings with
SSA, leaving behind railways, roads and port facilities that make trade easier for
all nations.
“I think in private there is very little US concern about what China is doing
1
in Africa,” commented Todd Moss , a senior fellow at the Center for Global
Development who served as a deputy assistant secretary of state in the Africa
division from 2007 to 2008, during US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2012
visit to Africa. “The US is not going to build highways and bridges and airports,
and that is something Africa needs, so we should be grateful that the Chinese are
doing this.”
Sadly, too many accounts of economic and political developments in Africa
Description:The Fastest Billion
