These are the 10 most competitive countries in Africa and Nigeria is not among them

shakirudeen taiwo

September 27, 2017 12:25 PM

Nigeria's government efforts at enhancing the ease of doing business in the country are not yet yielding the expected impacts.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has released its annual Global Competitiveness Index report for 2017-2018, and most African countries ranked better than Nigeria.

According to the report which was released on Tuesday, September 26, 2016, only four African countries managed to improve their productivity and economic prosperity.

"Competitiveness is stalling across sub-Saharan Africa: In fact, only Ethiopia, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda have managed to improve performance consecutively for five years since 2010," it stated.

Global Competitiveness Index report assesses factors driving countries’ productive and prosperous. These factors are scored to inform the overall competitiveness ranking of a country.

The 12 factors are infrastructure, institutions, education and healthcare, labour market efficiency, innovation, market size, Technological readiness, Business sophistication, macroeconomic environment among others.

According to the report, the following are the most competitive countries in Africa: Mauritius (45), Rwanda (58), South Africa (61), Botswana (63), Morocco (71), Algeria (86), Namibia (90), Kenya (91), Tunisia (95) and Egypt (96).

Nigeria’s ranking improved by 2 points from 127 to 125 "only because other countries are deteriorating faster."

In the same case, challenges hindering the country's improvement in the index are unstable macroeconomic environment (down 14 to 122) and institutional strength (down 7 to 125).

Other factors also noted include poor infrastructure (132 on the index) and Health and Primary Education (136 on the index).

shakirudeen taiwo