The following is a short excerpt of The 7 Myths About Risk in Africa. Please refer to the PDF download for the full article including references.

Africa is still viewed by many as a terra nullius – an uncharted land of danger and mystery. With all the horror stories of plagues and war coming out of the continent, not to mention fables of the new Eldorado, arguably foreigners’ perceptions of Africa have not moved on much from the days of the early explorers.

Yet this ‘unknown’ continent is a vibrant hive of economic activity that any investor would be unwise to ignore. To get past the stereotypes about Africa, it is necessary to consider how our perceptions of contemporary Africa have been formed by popular history and the domineering gaze of the international media. With an awareness of these biases we can then rethink some of the common misconceptions about the economic challenges facing Africa: lack of productivity; corruption and the rule of law; infrastructural underdevelopment, and so on. In many cases, what appears to be absent may in fact be present in a different form; in others, a problem may appear insoluble, but only because the textbook rules may not apply. Overall, the purpose of this article is to encourage the reader to look at African investment strategy from a more open-minded and localised perspective.

Please refer to the PDF download for the full article including references.