Document: Creating an enabling environment for private sector development in Sub-Saharan Africa

This report discusses how the business environment in sub-Saharan Africa can be improved in order to foster enterprise development. Past efforts to boost private sector development have shown disappointing results. This holds especially for the orthodox structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s and 1990s. But also the wide array of support schemes by governments and donors aimed to strengthen specific industries, groups of enterprises, or supporting institutions have rarely had a significant impact. Although a few remarkable project successes exist, these mostly remain isolated events with no country-wide outreach and no measurable effect on aggregate economic growth.