Ghana Reflects Progress in Africa

Mavis Boakye sits in a back of a taxi on her way home after work in Accra, Ghana on Friday, Nov. 9, 2007. (AP Photo/Olivier Asselin) (Olivier Asselin - Associated Press)

He launched Type Company with money borrowed from family and friends. Business grew rapidly _ almost too rapidly. Type Company had to outsource printing to others in Ghana, and the quality fell.

So Asmah bought a state-of-the-art, custom-made printing press and other equipment from Germany for more than $1 million. He diversified into security printing for banks, colorful packaging for local products and annual reports for dozens of businesses, which, like his, are homegrown and growing.

"Once you have a solution to someone else's problem, you have a business," says Asmah, whose polished appearance and calm demeanor project the image he wants for his high-end designs, despite a cluttered office full of computers and printers. "There is a lot of opportunity, because here, there is not a lot that is done right."Things not done right trip up businesses like his. It took five years to persuade a bank to help him lease $10,000 worth of equipment. Financing in Africa is hard to get, with high interest rates and stringent requirements. Government tariffs on paper and ink also drive up his costs, and he can't compete with preprinted imports because they are not taxed.

But Asmah says the odds of success in Africa are greater than anywhere else, including America.

Asmah is part of what economist Ayittey calls Africa's "cheetah generation" _ young entrepreneurs who are fast, smart, adaptable and ready to tackle Africa's problems. Eventually _ and it will take time _ he predicts the cheetahs could overtake the bureaucrats and dictators who blame Africa's problems on colonialism and don't address them.

It is already happening in Ghana. Democracy is strong, and the economy is growing by 6 percent a year. The World Bank recently praised Ghana as one of the leading business reformers in the world. Ghana's debt is down by more than two-thirds from its peak of $6 billion in 2001, and inflation is under control.

Economic stability in turn draws investment. Foreign investment in Africa rose to a record $39 billion in 2006 from $31 billion just a year earlier, only partly because of oil revenues.

"It's a young economy and anyone who looks into that will see that Ghana is a safe terrain to be in," notes Asmah, who says his business exceeds $1 million a year in revenue and brings profits of 30 percent. "Returns on investment here are 20 percent higher than anywhere else."

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Accra's first suburbs sprawl northward from the Atlantic Ocean, low-slung bungalows that stretch out on generous plots surrounded by high brick walls. Wide roads are laid out in a perfect grid. The neighborhood is in various stages of construction, but the shade trees around the more established homes hint at its future charm.

Mavis Boakye, 30, shares one of the new four-bedroom, cream-colored bungalows with her banker husband, her four-month-old son and her mother. Every workday morning, she climbs into a taxi for the 45-minute drive into her office in town.

Boakye is a department head at Type Company who supervises the digital graphic design team. The daughter of a poor civil servant laborer, she spent two years of mandatory government service producing drawings for Ministry of Health brochures. Afterward, she went straight to work because she could not afford university.