90 million African households will enter the consumer class over the next decade, contributing to a total household purchasing power of US$2.1 trillion, Africa is the world’s second-fastest growing economy, well above the global average. However, besides the details noted previously on the realities of corruption in Africa, the above positive points must also be tempered with an underlying of the “ease of doing business in Africa.” The Doing Business project, launched in 2002, looks at domestic small and medium-size companies and measures the regulations applying to them through their life cycle (World Bank 2017). In particular, these measures (see Figure 1) assess the ease of doing business for small and medium-size enterprises, operating in the largest city of a specific country. There are eleven measures in all. On the 2017 ease of doing business index, seven of the 10 countries with the lowest scores are in Africa. More specifically, relative to other countries, it can be said that it is difficulty to do business in Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Libya, Eritrea and Somalia. Furthermore, no country in Africa falls in the top 50 countries in terms of ease of doing business (World Bank, 2017). Figure 1- Ease of Doing Business Measures Source: World Bank, 2017 The Reality of Corruption in Africa Corruption is often associated with what has been labeled the “resource curse”. Similarly, economists have noted the “paradox of plenty”, in which resource-dependent economies
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