Assessing the Organisation pour l’harmonisation en Afrique du droit des affaires’s Contributions to Poverty Reduction in Africa: A Grounded Outlook
Authors: Deschamps Isabelle 
Published: August 2013

This article inquires into the Organisation pour l’harmonisation du droit des affaires en Afrique (OHADA)’s claims to innovation for its law reform processes and into its ambition to become a precedent for pursuing legal integration among countries elsewhere in Africa and in the world. It seeks to assess whether the OHADA regime effectively contributes to, or has the potential to contribute to, socio-economic development in member states. In making this assessment, the article revisits assumptions about the part that international and Western inspired law should play in development, institutional renovation and law reform in OHADA countries. The article argues that a shift of paradigms should occur in OHADA and international economic law from the foreign investor credo towards a more nuanced empirically informed approach to law making. Legal, policy and economic experts should concentrate more efforts on the needs, practices and realities of businesses in OHADA states, particularly local enterprises the majority of which are micro, small and medium (MSM) and are regulated by both formal and unofficial rules. Focusing on facilitating the operation of local businesses as well as on poverty reduction rather than on making regional economic integration, the dominant goal of business law reform in the OHADA can lead to commercial rules and strategies more successful at fostering sustainable development in member parties.

Bearing this in mind, the article analyses some of the innovations ascribed to the OHADA regime with a view to investigating whether they actually contribute usefully to the operation of businesses and more generally to socio-economic development in member states. The attributes examined concern both the form and the substance of the new law. Part A looks at the alleged increased physical accessibility and logical ordering of member states’ business law rules. In order to better appreciate the impact of this claimed novelty, Part B focuses on the OHADA Acts themselves and analyses three of their fundamental characteristics, namely their supranational, transplanted and viral-like nature, the latter two qualifiers being used metaphorically. The article shows that while OHADA-promoted rules and concepts are innovative in a number of respects, their supranational, transplanted and viral qualities have either little, none or adverse effects on the operation of local MSM businesses in the OHADA region.

Some commentators contend that the adverse effects and poor effectiveness of laws can be linked to a system’s legal origins. In particular, law and economics scholars and other academics have asserted that common law is a superior normative framework to civil law for law reform aimed at promoting economic development and the “rule of law”. Part C considers this claim and argues that the debate is beside the point since it presupposes a hermetic conception of legal traditions, conceives development as being primarily dependent on foreign investment and does not rest on solid empirical data from OHADA states.