ENTERPRISE AFRICA!
It may be the most obvious advice ever uttered: Do what works. But when it comes to programs that help alleviate poverty, the solutions are anything but obvious. Or are they? At the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Brian Hooks and Karol Boudreaux are leading a project to document enterprise-based solutions to poverty on the African continent. Called “Enterprise Africa!”, the project’s mission is to bring research about what works at a local level into international policy discussions.

“This is a story we never hear about,” say Boudreaux. “We hear about what’s wrong in Africa, what’s not working, but what’s really amazing about African entrepreneurship is how many positive stories there are to tell. From the tiniest examples of folks selling bread meal out of a tiny shack all the way up to somebody like Herman Mashaba, who founded the company Black Like Me, which was an amazingly successful black cosmetic company.”

The winner of a $500,000 prize from the Foundation, the Enterprise Africa! project is working with entrepreneurs in many of the world’s poorest countries, including South Africa, Mauritius, Namibia, Rwanda, Kenya, Botswana and Tanzania to understand how poverty can be fought on the local level. “If you’re the one facing a problem, you typically have the knowledge to address that problem in a way that somebody in a bureaucracy in Washington D.C. doesn’t. That’s the kind of lesson we’ve taken from a lot of the studies we’ve done in Africa and elsewhere,” says Director at Mercatus for Enterprise Africa!, Brian Hooks.

Boudreaux says a trip through the poorest areas in Africa shows hardworking people who can’t get a job in the formal sector, or choose to try to build a business, “Africa is an unbelievably rich and diverse entrepreneurial environment. We can help entrepreneurs by talking about some of the barriers that keep them from doing even more,” says Boudreaux.

African entrepreneurs come in many guises, including owners of spaza shops who buy 10 pound bags of corn meal and sell them in one pound packets to those who can only afford to buy in small quantities. Taxi drivers represent another group of entrepreneurs. “Taxi services in South Africa really grew out of the Apartheid experience,” says Boudreaux. “Under Apartheid the White National Party government significantly restricted economic opportunity for black citizens, and it moved them to outlying areas. A whole group of black entrepreneurs recognized that their fellow citizens needed to move around in ways that were relatively inexpensive and they began offering taxi services. Today, 65 percent of all South Africans who use public transportation use these black-owned, black-run, black-operated taxi services. When you talk to the taxi entrepreneurs, they say they got into the business because they wanted to empower themselves. They wanted to be in control of their own destiny.”

Enterprise Africa! is run out of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. The center is a research, education and outreach organization that works with scholars, policy experts and government officials to connect academic learning and real world practice. The first round of Enterprise Africa!’s research studies were published in early 2006.

“We don’t like to talk about poverty alleviation, as that makes the poor person a victim, and the relief agency a savior,” says Hooks. “We prefer to talk about wealth creation, as that makes the poor our allies in spurring development. This is not just semantics, but an important shift in perception.”

www.mercatus.org/enterpriseafrica