The Last Emerging Market: From Asian Tigers to African Lions? : The Ghana File

Bowditch refuses to see African nations as basketcases on a continent of despair; instead, he examines Ghana as a country of potential opportunity in an economically emerging continent. He explores a new generation of issues around the connection between cultural values and behavior to provide international investors, Ghanaians, and others with a better understanding of the Ghanaian-and African-business environment.

Drawing upon some seven years of living and working in Ghana, Bowditch provides several different contemporary vantage points on sub-Saharan Africa’s first independent nation. First examining the core cultural values of the Ghanaian people, he then looks at Ghanaian business practices. The result is an indepth look at how Ghanaians approach life, business, religion, and family, how that directly impacts the way they manage their institutions, and how that differs from prevailing international business behavior. Bowditch then probes these cultural differences and the frequently overlooked racial preconceptions that impede relations and collaboration between Ghanaians, other Africans, and Westerners. Through his unusually intimate exploration of Ghanaian life, values, business thinking, and management culture, Bowditch brings the reader full circle, answering the question: can Africa become an economic lion?

NATHANIEL H. BOWDITCH is a Senior Fellow at the New England Board of Higher Education in Boston, where he directs the New England Public Policy Collaborative program./e Mr. Bowditch has directed municipal and state government agencies, headed five non-governmental organizations and conducted consultancies throughout Asia, West Africa, Eastern Europe, Russia, Brazil, and the Northeastern United States. In the early 1990s, he worked for the United Nations Development Program and a consortium of U.S. non-governmental organizations coordinating an ecotourism project focused on the rehabilitation of slave castles and the creation of Ghana’s newest national park and development of a tourism business sector.