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Article: Rediscovering the middle of Africa. (Economics Focus)
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- December 8, 1990
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1990 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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IN 1976 Mrs Irene Dufu, a Ghanaian nurse, took her retirement bonus back to her native fishing village and used it to go into business. Today she employs 65 fishermen on three boats, and sells $1.2m, worth of fish a year. She is the subject of one of 25 case studies in a new report by Mr Keith Marsden for the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the arm of the World Bank that helps finance private ventures.
Development economists sometimes talk as if there were no such entrepreneurs in Africa. They complain about a missing middle": Africa, they say, has vast state COmpanies and thousands of subsistence hustlers, but virtually nobody in between. Last year a ...