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)

Now Type Company is paying $800 a month for her to go to university part-time, and she lives a solidly middle-class life. She and her husband watch Christian satellite television on a Sony Corp. home theater system. They shop at a new mall. They eat pizza at a South African fast food chain, and belong to a middle class sometimes nicknamed "black diamonds."

"I am making three times or four times what my father was making, and sometimes he looks at me and marvels and says, `I am happy you are doing well in life,'" Boayke says.

Boayke is an example of how wealth from companies is slowly trickling down through communities, in a part of the world where each worker supports six people on average.

In 2000, Africa's middle class of 12.7 million people made up just 2 percent of the population, according to the World Bank. By 2030, it is expected to more than triple to 43 million, or 4 percent of the population.

However, Africa remains overwhelmingly poor. Ten percent of the world's poor people now live in Africa, and that is expected to rise to 13 percent in the next 25 years.

The best hope for the poor could be private enterprise, which creates 90 percent of the jobs in developing countries. But business is dragged down by a lack of education, unreliable power, bad roads, disease and a long list of other problems.

Choking bureaucracy means that it takes 95 days to start a business in Tanzania, 138 days in Ghana and 177 days in Chad. In Australia, it takes one day.

Recently, African countries have begun to cut business costs and red tape, according to the World Bank. Ghana lowered corporate taxes and slashed paperwork at customs. Tanzania has reduced the cost of starting a business by 40 percent. Kenya is simplifying its business licenses.

Boayke has been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug herself.

"The plan is that in three years, I will start something on my own," she says. "My husband wants me to start now because he thinks I will make more money, but I think I need to make more contacts before I start."

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Near the port in Accra, the Ghanaian government has set up duty-free industrial zones to spur international trade. Hand-painted logos adorn the walls of the warehouse-style buildings, and their large wooden doors open off the loading docks. At lunchtime, women sell hot meals of beans and rice to workers in the shade of the eaves.