MERCATUS CENTER

ENTERPRISE AFRICA!
What Works in Enterprise-Based Solutions to Poverty

The Mercatus Center at George Mason University with its partners, the Free Market Foundation, located in South Africa and the Institute of Economic Affairs operating out of London, have launched Enterprise Africa! a project to reveal innovative solutions to problems of poverty in Africa and to move towards policies that generate more opportunities for the world’s poor to improve their quality of life. The project is made possible by the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation.

Through Enterprise Africa! the Mercatus team will conduct rigorous case studies of entrepreneurship in Africa to illuminate alternatives to failed ideas about how best to eradicate poverty.

While western elites hold conferences on how best to redistribute wealth, unsung entrepreneurs are quietly erasing - at the micro level - devastating problems of poverty in some of the poorest places in the world. This fresh perspective - that the solutions to world poverty are not to be found in international aid bureaucracies so much as in the hearts and hands of the world’s poor themselves - must be articulated and substantiated in order to help policy makers and opinion leaders understand that institutions that support enterprise are not the culprit, but the remedy.

Mercatus field teams will undertake academically sound, yet very accessible cases in three distinct, but related categories:

• Entrepreneurial business development and community creation,
• Innovative public policies that create the space for entrepreneurship, and
• Enterprise-based delivery of social services such as health care and education.

The object will be to discover important institutional lessons about what can work, even in the most adverse of circumstances, to improve the lives of the poor in the developing world.

Cases will be presented as:

• Policy Comments, educational courses, and Consultation with policymakers,
• Media pieces along with a multimedia website, to infuse the development discussion with new ideas, and
• Monographs and journal articles to move the state of knowledge on international development forward.

There is good reason for the spotlight on Africa. Nowhere is the failure of old-style, development more prominent, the need for life-enhancing development more necessary, or the potential for new solutions that emphasize the role of the entrepreneur greater, than on the African continent. Opportunities that exist there can also illustrate lessons for the rest of the world.

The Mercatus Center has assembled a global team to address this global issue. Its innovative scholarly techniques are designed to yield action-oriented solutions that refocus development efforts by treating the poor as allies in the battle to eradicate poverty.