Côte d’Ivoire’s emerging SMEs The government is focusing on small business to diversify the economy Once the economic powerhouse of Francophone west Africa, Côte d’Ivoire has suffered decades of crisis. Now the world’s biggest cocoa producer is turning the tide on more than 30 years of economic hardship caused by conflict, draining structural adjustments, the devaluation of the regional currency and the tumbling cocoa price. From independence in 1960 to the 1980s, Côte d’Ivoire’s economy flourished from its fertile farmlands, which produced cocoa, coffee and palm oil. Those government-controlled sectors funded gleaming skyscrapers in the capital, Abidjan, and paid the…
