Making money and helping by investing in Africa

The world economy is shifting away a bit from the "first world", towards countries like China and Brazil, but poorer places in Africa south of Sahara are also starting to get more attention and are deemed to have more potential for growth.

At the same time there is a rather painful insight among many idealists in the developed world that development aid hasn't worked and that in may cases foreign aid has possibly destroyed more than it has helped. For liberals (freedom of the individual, free market) the obvious solution is free trade and strong institutions, and a number of liberals have taken it on themselves to pressure EU and other trading blocks to work in that direction. The results of this work proceeds at a glacial pace.

For socialists these trend towards deregulation and free trade smacks of oppression. I have lost count of the number of debates with socialists I have had about this.

However, if you subscribe to the more liberal (and more correct dare I say) world view of freedom to work and freedom to trade,  what can you do as an individual?

The blogger behind Hotel Ivory has taken upon himself (according the blog the blogger wishes to remain anonymous) to in a small way reach the goals of:

• Living the good life

• Do business in a country in west Africa with a violent history and somewhat problematic institutional and legal circumstances.

These goals are hardly unique to the blogger, but it is interesting to follow the analysis and decisions that are taken from a business sense but also liberal perspective. So far the blog has dealt with:

• Whom can you trust?
• Should you invest in the finer areas or more middle-of-the-road areas?
• Analysis of the rental situation in Abidjan

I believe that if thousands (if not millions) of people started doing stuff like this, we should see some pretty strong devlopment all over the world. Problem being of course that these enterprises are fraught with risk. In the nineties, the currency used in the Ivory Coast was devalued by 50%. However as soon as a middle class starts to entrench itself, the virtues of good governance tend to make it into the seats of power. There is just a need to reach that tipping point.