An Overview of Corporate Governance in Africa

Abstract

This paper titled: “An overview of corporate governance in Africa” tries to address whether the African countries, which currently have a corporate governance code in place, have acknowledged their specific context and environment in developing their own corporate governance codes. According to many researchers, there are no universal laws in corporate governance and the efficiency of specific corporate governance practices can vary in different contexts. The researcher applied archival research techniques to analyze the national corporate governance codes of each country. This has enabled an analysis of multiple countries simultaneously and also a comparative analysis of older and newer codes of the same country. The findings conclude that African corporate governance codes have not merely been mimicked from their colonizer’s code, but rather African countries have in their codes addressed issues which are relevant for their environment, such as strong communal values and corruption. However, the codes still have room for improvement in relation to minority rights protection and in the encouragement of institutional investor participation for example. The study found that those African countries which have a corporate governance code in place are on average less corrupt than the countries which do not have such code in place at the moment.