Making Markets Work: An Executive Education Program for Africa

In the last decades of the 20th century economic growth was distributed unevenly across the world. While some countries experienced sustained and unprecedented prosperity, others fell further and further behind. This widening gap was particularly evident in Africa, where per capita incomes actually declined and disease and war continue to ravage large sections of the continent.

There are many factors that have contributed to this troubling performance: the weight of a colonial past, the vagaries of climate and geography, the torment of war. These are all well-known and exceedingly difficult to address. Equally critical, though, and somewhat more amenable, is the role of governance and the state. Where governments are effective and institutions sound, growth in Africa and elsewhere has generally proceeded apace. Where firms are able to access capital and international markets, development followed suit. Where governments are ineffective, however, and markets weak, growth has faltered, leaving nations to bear the increasing burdens of poverty.

Making Markets Work is an executive education program focused on development and targeted at managers in both the public and private sectors. It starts with the presumption that both government and markets are critical to a nation's social and economic growth and that both public and private sector managers need to understand and play a role in the governance process. Using a combination of cases, videos, texts and online exercises, the course will expose participants to both leading research and local best practice. It will endeavor to engage participants in their own process of discovery, exploring how firms and governments can together affect the pattern of development in Africa, and how individual leaders can contribute to both governance and growth.