Publications

13 Apr 2023
News

Why Africa Is One of the Most Unequal Continents in the World

Panel Discussion

Chief Executive Officers’ Dialogue: Towards an Agenda for Inclusive Growth in Africa

By: Robert Gumede, Aziz Mebarek, Jubril Adewale Tinubu, Catherine Samba-Panza, Euvin Naidoo, Donald Kaberuka and Lerato Mbele

What about the race between education and technology in the Global South? Comparing skill premiums in colonial Africa and Asia

Historical research on the race between education and technology has focused on the West but barely touched upon ‘the rest’. A new occupational wage database for 50 African and... View Details

2015
Case

Advanced Leadership Pathways: Robert Meaney and Technology for Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Renee Vuillaume

Two Valmont Industries (an international leader in infrastructure products and services) colleagues, Robert (Bob) Meaney and Richard Berkland hoped to improve the lives of small and medium-sized farmers in the developing world through modern irrigation technology. In... View Details

2011
Working Paper

Divide and Rule or the Rule of the Divided? Evidence from Africa

By: Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou

We investigate jointly the importance of contemporary country-level institutional structures and local ethnic-specific pre-colonial institutions in shaping comparative regional development in Africa. We utilize information on the spatial distribution of African... View Details

Keywords: Ethnicity; Development Economics; Geography; Government and Politics; Africa

November 2020 (Revised January 2021)
Supplement

Bridge International Academies in 2020: Battling Headwinds to Solve Africa's Education Problems

By: Caroline M. Elkins, Tarun Khanna and Joyce J. Kim

By 2020, Bridge International Academies and its "school in a box" model had achieved great scale. By leveraging digital technology and public-private partnerships, they had reached one million children across Africa and India through hundreds of schools. However, the... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship In Africa; Entrepreneurship In Emerging Markets; Bottom Of The Pyramid; Education In Africa; Scale; Partnerships; Education; Entrepreneurship; Emerging Markets; Health Pandemics; Problems and Challenges; Education Industry; Africa

27 Oct 2020

External Partner Event: Top Business School Discussion Series: From Africa to the MBA

on students and alumni who are either from Africa or have career interests on the continent. This conversation will be moderated by an admissions officer and will be followed by a Q&A session. View Details

27 Nov 2023
Podcast

From Rags to (Shared) Riches: How James Mwangi Democratized Financial Access Across Africa

James Mwangi made a courageous decision to leave a comfortable, big-city banking job to rescue Equity Building Society, a local financial institution on which Kenyan farmers and villagers depended. Under his leadership, the struggling firm transformed into a... View Details

Africa Rising: Understanding Business, Entrepreneurship, and the Complexities of a Continent - Course Catalog

HBS Course Catalog Africa Rising: Understanding Business, Entrepreneurship, and the Complexities of a Continent Course Number 1555 Senior Lecturer Hakeem I. Belo-Osagie Spring; Q4; 1.5 credits 6 Sessions Paper This short course is... View Details

2015
Working Paper

Service Quality, Inventory and Competition: An Empirical Analysis of Mobile Money Agents in Africa

By: Karthik Balasubramanian and David F. Drake

The use of electronic money transfer through cellular networks ("mobile money") is rapidly increasing in the developing world. The resulting electronic currency ecosystem could improve the lives of the estimated 2 billion people who live on less than $2 a day by... View Details

Keywords: Operations Strategy; Base Of The Pyramid; Mobile Money; Inventory Management; Competition; Currency; Service Operations; Mobile and Wireless Technology

SSRN

Working Paper

Institutional Access and Failure: Colonial Legal Systems and Persistent Institutional Inadequacy in Tropical Africa

By: Catherine S. M. Duggan

2016
Other Unpublished Work

Turning the World Upside Down: The Investment Opportunity in Africa Has Never Been Stronger

By: Euvin Naidoo

Turning the World Upside Down: The Investment Opportunity in Africa Has Never Been Stronger

HuffPost, September 14, 2016. View Details

2024
Article

Thy Neighbor's Gendarme? How Citizens of Buffer States in North Africa View EU Border Security Externalization

By: Matt Buehler, Kristin Fabbe and Eleni Kyrkopoulou

To stop refugees and migrants, states have enlisted neighboring third countries to act as buffers, thereby outsourcing border security. With many sub-Saharan migrants transiting North Africa, these regimes there have increasingly served as the EU’s gendarme. Existing... View Details

Keywords: Border Externalization; Border Security; Migration; Sub-Saharan African Migrants; Immigration; National Security; North Africa; Morocco

SPNM Perspectives: Chienye Ogwo, Africa Initiative for Governance | Social Enterprise | Harvard Business School

06 Dec 2021
News

Elevator Pitch: Power Sourced

grand-prize winner in the 2021 Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge, Chaku launched its first product, Nikki’s Plantain Crisps, in South Africa in 2020. For its US market approach, the company is initially employing a higher-margin,... View Details

Keywords: agriculture; Africa; food manufacturing; entrepreneurship; startup; Agriculture; Food Manufacturing; Manufacturing

November 2018 (Revised January 2021)
Case

Peak Investment Capital

By: Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff

Kobbina Awuah (MBA 2014) became intrigued with the possibility of adapting Entrepreneurship through Acquisition in Ghana, where he grew up and where his family still lived. While he knew he could work for a multi-national enterprise located in Ghana, he was confident... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship In Africa; Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition; Entrepreneurship; Acquisition; Ghana

Educators