Top Reads: Trapezoid growth, international biases and ESG

Outcomes emerge from systems. That’s true for states, companies and households alike. However individual decisions, values and communication strategies, in other words leadership, matter too. Ghanaian Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta’s recent interview with Bloomberg is interesting in that it touches on all the above (see here).

In it, he states (a) his expectation that Ghana will experience “trapezoid” growth i.e. steep decline from almost 7% per annum in 2019 to 1.2% this year, followed by a slow slide over three years and then upturn, (b) his belief that risk assessment and the cost of borrowing for African countries in international markets is off, and that the global financial infrastructure, requires redesign, and (c) that the racial justice movement in the US has given people of African origin in the United States and in the diaspora the opportunity to see themselves as one people. Further that “all of humanity is at risk if we don’t rediscover ourselves as a people”. Ken Ofori-Atta is an influential member of government. If this is his worldview, we should expect to see it reflected in policy.

Ofori-Atta’s statement also points to a continuum of interests surrounding multinational corporations. One wherein the hard thinking, or better yet listening, being done around “black lives matter” must extend to Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) commitments in Africa. On that front, in 2019 the UK’s CDC released its Africa List Business Barometer[1] surveying business leaders in the DRC, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia on the opportunities and challenges as they see them. One of the key take aways from the CDC study was the extent to which respondents asked to define the ‘foremost way in which businesses do good’, picked job creation over and above selling needed products/services, paying taxes, engaging in CSR or creating wealth for shareholders (see here). We have discovered similar in studies of social enterprises with an explicit commitment to the “triple bottom line” in other countries.

To learn more about any of the issues discussed, please don’t hesitate to get in touch: questions@songhaiadvisory.com

[1] http://theafricalist.com/the-africa-list-business-barometer/