Advice & Assistance to Promote Private Enterprises

IFC is working to expand the scale of private investment and its quality in Africa. IFC also provides advisory services to private companies, governments, business associations and through partnerships, which promotes private sector development.

Private Enterprise Partnership for Africa (PEP Africa)

PEP Africa is the primary platform by which IFC offers advisory services in the region. It offers programs on issues related to investment climate, access to finance, physical and social infrastructure, firm and sector competitiveness, and environmental and social opportunities. It works closely with IFC's Financial Markets Advisory Services on a number of assignments to support viable financial systems in the continent.

IFC adds enormous value to private sector development through its advisory services to governments on privatization and corporate restructuring of state-owned assets. The objective is two-fold:

• To proactively leverage an environment for successful private sector projects
• To create a more benign national and sectorial environment for supporting larger investments by IFC by engaging farther upstream in the project cycle, especially in, though not exclusively, infrastructure and other sectors identified by IFC as priorities for optimizing sustainable private sector investment in Africa.

PEP Africa Fact Sheet [pdf]

Advisory Services

The Advisory Services Department advises governments and state-owned enterprises on the privatization of state-owned assets and other forms of transactions that promote sustainable public-private partnerships. It remains at the forefront of advisory services in the water, power, and telecommunications sectors on the continent.

Prominent recent transactions in Africa include SONEL, Cameroon's electricity utility, Mauritania telecom (Mauritel), Uganda Telecom (UTL) and SEEG, Gabon's water and electricity utility. Learn more...

Foreign Investment Advisory Service (FIAS)

The Foreign Investment Advisory Service, which is run jointly by the IFC and the World Bank Group, has so far helped 38 African countries liberalize their investment regimes and improve their attractiveness to FDI.

Examples of FIAS's current projects in Africa include Lesotho, where FIAS is providing advisory services to the government for the modernization of the company registration functions, and the reform of the manufacturing and trade licensing system. In Kenya, FIAS has integrated gender issues into its ongoing administrative barriers project. Meanwhile in Zambia, FIAS is carrying out an administrative barriers project to provide inputs for a reform program aimed at improving the business environment, increasing investment, and ultimately contributing to the reduction of poverty.

Private Sector Development

The Private Sector Development Department, which is run jointly by IFC and the World Bank Group, also provides a unique service to governments in Africa and elsewhere in the world through its highly innovative Doing Business indicator project. This database provides objective measures of business regulations – essentially micro investment factors - and their enforcement.

Doing Business

The Doing Business Indicators are comparable both on a cross-country and intra-regional basis across more than 130 economies – including virtually all countries in Sub-Sahara Africa. They indicate the regulatory costs of five key indicators of the business environment: starting a company, the ease of enforcing contracts in local jurisdictions, flexibility in hiring and firing workers, obtaining credit, and resolving bankruptcy. They can be easily used to analyze specific regulations that enhance or constrain investment, productivity and growth in Africa.

Doing Business complements the work of the World Bank Group's Investment Climate Surveys in Africa, which have been launched with private firms in 23 countries as of FY 2004. The surveys use data to identify policy, regulatory, and institutional constraints to private investment and firms' performance.