Africa: ethical business A long-term approach to doing business anywhere relies on nurturing relationships, and perhaps more in Africa than elsewhere By Alain Tschudin Ten years ago, many organisations engaged in Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR, as an add-on contribution to the betterment of society, or at a barebones minimum, as perceived by the cynics, as an afterthought to demonstrate compliance with various codes of best practice. Nowadays, CSR has all but disappeared from the vocabulary of the corporate world and it has become integrated into the core business of most organisations. But is good business a question of appropriate…
Alain Tschudin
In this Africa in Fact edition dedicated to culture, Fred Khumalo paraphrases our mutual friend Mondli Makhanya who, in the midst of a debate with a right-of-centre interlocutor, asserted that, “I am a South African and that’s where it ends”. Much as this position is apt within a national discourse on identity politics, if we zoom out to the continent, Africanness has to be our departure point; for in one simple sense, culture is the outwardly radiating manifestation of our being in the world. To elaborate, Max, a cab driver in DC who hails from Ghana, shares the following insight,…
Welcome to the first edition of Africa in Fact for 2018 – and the first to appear on shelves at selected bookstores. The topic is natural resources, which is also one of our core programmes at Good Governance Africa. We adopt a broad definition of resources, but our focus has been primarily on extractives and the pursuit of the “green” and “blue” economies, as well as the related issues of land, power and energy.
Identity politics loom large at the African Union (AU). As some of our writers show in this edition of Africa in Fact, many Africans still do not know what the AU actually is or does, other than that it is housed in a glitzy Chinese-funded building in the heart and heat of Addis Ababa. Since its inception there in 2001, there has been a push to make the AU more real, both for African states and citizens. Some might see this as a personalisation of the institution. However, much more mileage needs to be clocked before any fruits of this…
The topic of ethnicity rears its head all too frequently, not just in Africa but globally, as we confront identity politics and notions of sameness and difference. Consider the contentious, contemporary spread of Syrian refugees seeking asylum and the Trumpomania surrounding Mexicans entering the US.
Foreign direct investment (FDI), much like a stethoscope or a thermometer, can be thought of as a diagnostic tool that detects the pulse, respiration and temperature of a nation’s economic environment. It provides insights into the health and vital signs of the business environment, guiding prospective investor buy-in to what’s hot and what’s not.
GGA’s aim is to provide credible and fact-based information about the state of Africa. In the run-up to the South African local elections we commissioned marketing and strategic research company Markdata to include a number of questions focusing on the perceived quality of local government in the country on our behalf as part of their 2015 national survey. We were left feeling so unsettled by the findings that we had KPMG check the numbers for us in relation to our report. They all tally up. The results are revealing, to say the least. They confirm an urgent need for South…
