What are the Best Countries in Africa for Doing Business?

hi dear Africa business gem status this is dr. Arnott's your Africa business coach online and offline happy New Year to you and welcome to my youtube channel so the first thing I want to let you know is that I will be producing and sharing more YouTube videos from now on and simply because I want to get more tips in size and success strategies out there so you can start your African business more confidently faster and above all the right way so what I did is I looked at the the common questions I get from our Africa business jumpstart community online and there are some questions that come up again and again actually send a quick survey out yesterday to our online community in regards to a free webinar that I wanted to host and there were so many questions and topics that were of interest that I will you know take some of them to produce YouTube videos so that I really you know bring you the things that are of interest to you and yeah let's get started with one question that I received a couple of time yesterday and that was what are the best countries in Africa to do business in it's a very important question it's a very good question but the answer of course is not clear-cut and it's not as easy so I want to try to answer it let me start with the first level and then I will will go a level up so to speak and the first thing I want to say is that I think it's very important for us as the African diaspora that first of all we don't make emotional or attached decisions when it comes to our market selection in Africa so your home country if you still have close links to the continent your home country may or may not be a good country to do business in it may have an abling business environment or it may be very risky it may be a growth country or it may that may not be that at all so I I believe this is where it starts you know and I'm therefore glad that people ask me that question because it means they want to make informed decisions in this regard so that's number one number two is um well it depends on what a good country means and I guess what a lot of people mean by that is they're looking for a country where you have an enabling business environment where doing business is you know relatively easy and opportunities great so some of the best countries of course are the ones that I put in the category they're high in opportunity but relatively low in risk so it's the category that that ratio high opportunity and relatively low in risk and these are of course great markets to get into now a good indicator or good tool that you can use trade way to to look for this kind of markets if they're ranking by the World Bank the the World Bank does a global ranking of countries in terms of Ease of Doing Business of these countries so they take parameters or indicators into consideration such as how long does it take to get your business license how much will investors be protected how easy is it to trade across borders and so on and so forth so these are very important indicators that will you know let you know how enabling a business environment is in a certain country now when you go to this list and I'll give you actually the the link right here it's WWWE business dot org and now it comes slash rankings and that's very important the slash rankings otherwise you receive the entire report but you just want the list now with that list you you know you can see which of the African can't trees are scoring higher up you won't see any unfortunately at the top of the list because this is a global ranking but you can still look which of which of the African countries are you know ranking much higher than the others we have 54 markets so you could be looking for example for the top 15 or the top 20 I would really go for them maybe the top 10 or 10 top 15 - to be sure that these countries have in relation to the other African countries a much much better business environment in terms of enabling business in terms of Ease of Doing Business now this is I think one very important indicator but then again if you ask what is the best country to do business in there's so many things that you need to keep in mind so first of all what's your interest what's your industry interest you see there are certain countries where your industry may be on a clear upward trend where you have you know huge dynamics and then you have other countries where your industry of choice may simply be in its infant shoes and that means you know they're they're not enough players in the industry there's there is not a good infrastructure set in place there's there's simply no dynamics that you can tap into you and that means it will be very difficult for you as a start-up to get that industry into motion so you need to look also at that constellation in terms of where in which countries in Africa is my industry on a clear upward trend really dynamic and where we can see a lot of growth and and things happen but other indicators may be okay at best markets I am looking for a very stable market you know a market where we have long term political stability where I don't need to worry that political unrest will affect my business well in that case for example I'm just giving you a few examples we can feed differentiation in that case for example you may want to choose Ghana or Tanzania if you look at the top countries in terms of Ease of Doing Business the point I just mentioned earlier you looking at countries such as one South Africa Botswana Mauritius there are other indicators that may be important to you to make up you know to look for a good country and that is that maybe you want to have a country where infrastructure is in place a good infrastructure just just rolled out across the country you find that for example in Namibia in South Africa or you want to look for countries where you have a really vibrant consumer base maybe you are planning to manufacture or sell fast-moving consumer goods and and you're looking really to tap into a huge consumer base then choose Nigeria and Kenya for example you may want to look at countries where you say well a good country for me is one where the opportunities are not taken up yet where I have a big population yet the the opportunity the potential is so big because no one you know or not a lot of people are doing business there yet and so I have untapped potential you may be looking at big markets such as the DRC Democratic Republic of Congo Ethiopia for example maybe you're running an online business where you think okay a good market for me is one where I have fast connectivity I can make quick downloads and I can actually run my business without problems online a good country maybe Kenya Morocco what other country is good for online connectivity and those two are coming one that is also very good Nigeria is doing quite good improving in this regard so there are other markets also that come up you know that that come up now in in terms of so much more opportunity growing there and business environment is enabling so they're opening up in new ways you have countries like Ivory Coast and Mozambique for example what other indicators do we have I think I mentioned most of them just to give you examples and that really means that you cannot just you know pin pin down a country as being the best country to do business and there are many parameters that will play an important role as I have just showed you so important is to look at okay what industry do I want to go into and which of the indicators are very important to me corruption for example is another huge concern for many in the diaspora so if you're looking for countries where corruption is very low then it would be Wanda and Botswana for example as compared to other countries so the list goes really on and on and I could talk a lot about that and and you may maybe think okay why has my country not be mentioned I just want to give you an idea that there is no such thing as best country what I will be saying is there are countries that are not good to go into and these are countries in my view where the opportunity is quite low yet the risk is very high so you want to ideally look for countries where opportunity is big yet risk is relatively low as compared to other countries and the business environment is enabling this is where you want to get started later once you have you know a secure cash flow and you know how to operate you can always move into riskier countries so I hope this was helpful and it answered the question on you know what are the best countries to do business in Africa again if your country has not been mentioned I just wanted to give some examples and drive the message home I hope it was helpful and I'll see you with more questions in the next video so subscribe if you don't want to miss out and you will find also a link beneath the video where I offer free Africa business training series where you can just dig more and go more into the insides of how to do business in Africa it's goodbye from me now this dr. harness for you bye-bye

Channel: Dr. Harnet

Views: 36,387

Rating: 4.874423 out of 5

Keywords: Africa business, doing business in Africa, How to do business in Africa, African Diaspora, Investing in Africa, how to invest in AFrica, Africa, best countries in Africa, safest countries in Africa, African entrepreneurs, Africa business coach, Africa business consultant, Dr. Harnet

Id: -D3qBR9yHDk

Length: 11min 6sec (666 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 11 2018