We collect information on firm demography from censuses and surveys for more than 25 African countries from all regions and income levels between 2010 and 2020. We extract information on firm size based on the number of employees, which forms the distinction between micro, small, medium, and large firms. Further, where available, we add information on firms’ formality status - whether a firm is registered or at least licensed in the country or province, as well as sector.

We also identify where national censuses and surveys do not cover key sectors (e.g. agriculture), or explicitly exclude informal or household-based firms. We discard outdated censuses and surveys collected before 2010 as well as censuses and surveys that lack information about how data was collected. We restrict ourselves to censuses and surveys up to the year 2020, as evidence shows that the COVID-19 pandemic caused much volatility in firm entry and exit, and potentially large fluctuations in the number of firms (Decker and Haltiwanger, 2022). Evidence from rapid surveys suggests that up to 90 percent of firms in selected Sub-Saharan African countries closed temporarily (Aga and Maemir, 2021). Many firms had to lay off workers in the short term only, with consequences for a firm’s employee count. While recent surveys and censuses may give a more up-to-date assessment of the number and characteristics of firms, they may also introduce comparability issues with censuses and surveys collected pre-pandemic.

Collected data varies across countries in the definitions of size strata, and coverage of large and informal firms and sectors. As mentioned above, this compromises the harmonization of the datasets. We find meaningful differences, in particular, in how countries define a microenterprise. For instance, only entrepreneurs with no employees are considered micro-enterprises in the Gambia, but in three countries, establishments with up to ten employees are identified as micro-enterprises. Small firms are defined as anywhere from 1-4 employees to 10-100 employees (Morocco). Few countries follow the standardized WBES definitions of firm size: 5 to 19 (small), 20 to 99 (medium), and 100 or more (large). In the absence of available micro-data for censuses and surveys, this heterogeneity, unfortunately, cannot be resolved.

Further, the definition of informality (if included in the documentation) differs widely across countries. Some countries inherently include activities of households as employers as informal activities; others classify any micro-enterprise as informal, independent of firm registration. Some countries draw the line between formal and informal firms according to firm registration, firm licensing, or both. Other establishment censuses and surveysexplicitly exclude businesses without fixed premises from the stock of businesses, and others classify itinerant traders, taxis, or market stands as informal solely based on the lack of fixed premises. Where possible, we avoid relying on countries’ definition of formality, but instead extract information on the number of registered firms, and the number of licensed firms as a second-best measure of formal firms.

# **3 Methodology**

This section describes the methodology we followed to calculate the number of firms by country and the subsequent distinction by size group and formality status. Because harmonization across establishment censuses or registries is not currently feasible or available, based on ILO data, we 7