You could call it “the cult of the small”, the idea that small enterprises and smallholder farmers are the backbone of poor economies, the key to social resilience and the best hope for eliminating poverty. You see it in the emphasis on microloans, small businesses and funding community projects. These interventions are all very well. Safety nets, telephone banking and rural roads can help the income prospects of the very poorest. By some estimates, small and medium enterprises account for 80 per cent of Africa’s economic output. But the cult of the small needs a corrective. Africa needs to think big.
In cities across the continent, a “micro-entrepreneur”, as the development jargon has it, might just be the owner of a tanning works, a metal-bashing business or a tile-making factory. More likely she is a woman dodging traffic with a tray on her head hawking food to a tiny four-wheel-drive-owning elite. Or a man with a “shoeshine business” consisting of a rag, a broken box and half a tin of shoe polish.
The region’s cities are full of people with no formal jobs, hustling for a living. They are survivors who work long hours scrabbling together a pittance. If Africa’s future depends on their labour, then Africa is in trouble. No amount of access to finance is going to turn such “enterprises” into the building blocks of a modern economy.