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How can readers use this research?

Our first mission is to bring sub-Saharan Africa into the comfort zone for our clients. We clarify and analyze news, events, and themes. Our next goal is to steer the conversation about Africa toward business, investments, and economic issues. Finally, we discuss the ways in which Africa is an integral part of global economic and business trends—and how ideas can originate in the African Continent and spread around the world.

What’s inside?

Our Flash Updates include fresh and timely news and analysis to bring events into focus. We incorporate thoughts on how events and trends may affect African and global companies. We then bring the discussion down to a country, sector, or company specific level. Sectors in focus include fintech, agribusiness, technology, communications, financial services, consumer products, industrials, manufacturing, transportation, power, healthcare, education, and more. In writing our reports, we gather information from our own sources, draw on insights gathered during our travels to the continent, tap the resources of development finance institutions, and offer context to the story.

What we are watching:

We are paying close attention to critical issues affecting investors in today’s rapidly-changing economic and political environment. Some of the areas covered to date in our Flash Updates include:

• • Many African governments must do more to make their local business climates conducive to investment. We are watching as improved education, communication, and voter engagement combine to push officials to act.
  • The majority of the continent’s population is younger than 25. Countries are seeking creative ways to put young people to work in areas including agribusiness, manufacturing, and many types of services including healthcare, communications, financials, transportation, entertainment, and education.
  • Global competition benefits the continent. Africa is a competitive battleground between American, European, and Chinese firms in critical markets including power generation equipment, construction machinery, digital healthcare diagnostics, communications technology, and many more. Africa’s markets look small today—but multinationals must have a cohesive strategy for how to grow with the continent.
  • The African Continental Free Trade Area is taking shape and affecting policy, infrastructure programs, addressable markets for companies, and investment returns.
  • Innovation is a very exciting story across the continent. Africans are very tech-savvy, and communications capacity is expanding rapidly. We see numerous African solutions to local and global problems—benefiting Africans and also, over time, the world.

Experience plus perspective — insight for clients

African Sunrise Partners clients get insight into how global themes connect to events on the ground in Africa. Our Managing Director writes about development of industries, political trends, and local data points in thought-provoking ways. Information is gathered the old-fashioned way by visiting companies, government officials, investors, and local sources where they work. Our knowledge and network were built during more than 50 research trips to 16 African countries in the past decade.

About the author

African Sunrise Partners Flash Updates are written by Melissa Cook based on the work she does for her institutional investor and corporate clients. Ms. Cook has over 30 years of global research and business experience — including a front-row seat watching the emergence of new economies in Eastern Europe and China, and ten years covering Africa.

Melissa Cook covered several sectors as an equity analyst at Wall Street firms including Drexel Burnham Lambert, Prudential Securities, and CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets. She was Head of Global Research at Lazard Asset Management. Ms. Cook has an A.B. degree in History from Dartmouth College and an M.B.A. in Finance from the Stern School of Business at New York University. She is a CFA charterholder and holds FINRA Series 7, 16, 24, 63, 86, and 87 licenses.  In November 2014, Melissa Cook was appointed for a two-year term on President Obama’s Advisory Council on Doing Business in Africa.