A new World Bank report narrating 26 so-called African success stories highlights the catalytic role that some governments have played in stimulating these achievements by intervening in a manner designed to allow the private sector to flourish, rather than seeking to control the enterprise or industry.

The study, entitled 'Yes Africa Can: Success Stories from a Dynamic Continent', asserts that “collective action”, usually led by governments, has been the critical ingredient in some of the "remarkable" progress made in countries as diverse as Botswana and Ghana, to Mali and Rwanda.

Africa Region chief economist Shanta Devarajan, who released the report to African journalists via a video link from Washington DC, notes that, in many instances, success has been predicated on a governments creating the conditions for unleashing the “lurking entrepreneurial spirit” of Africa’s citizens.

“The way to collaborate with the private sector is for the government to do what is genuinely a public good, or externality, and for the private sector to do the rest,” Devarajan says.

He highlights particularly the success, over the last ten years, of Africa’s telecoms market liberalisaiton, which has resulted in more than 90% of all African urban dwellers gaining access to mobile telephony.

The report offers insight into similar examples of private enterprise benefiting from State facilitation, including the exponential growth in mango exports from landlocked Mali, made possible by an investment into a multimodal supply chain system.

This investment has resulted in a 150% increase in the price mango producers receive for their products, a 1 000% increase in the tonnage of mangoes exported between 1993 and 2008, and a reduction in the average transit time for mangoes between Mali and Europe, from 25 to 12 days.

Other examples explored include the rise of gorilla tourism in Rwanda, and State roles in building apparel production in Lesotho, where the respective governments “stepped in to provide the elements necessary for the private sector to thrive”.

The 492-page document is likely to be the first in a series of reports that will seek to move beyond the aggregate growth numbers and elaborate on the reasons behind that growth.

Africa’s gross domestic product expanded by over 5% a year in the decade leading up to the global economic crisis of 2008 and 2009. And, besides the countries of North Africa and the Côte d'Ivoire, which have, or are still, experiencing political upheavals, is poised to rebound to precrisis growth rates in 2011 and 2012.

However, Devarajan argues that the current African narrative has been slow to reflect the new dynamism and "how we got there".

The report’s main editor, Punam Chuhan-Pole, says the case studies highlights four broad categories where collective action has supported the success stories, including those instances where government has rationalised it’s market involvement to support private enterprises development.

The other key themes include the reversal of growth-constraining policies, the rebuilding of post-conflict governments and “bottom-up” participatory interventions, whereby the government’s actions followed interaction where citizens were able to provide input.

Chuhan-Pole argues that, by showing that progress has come about through a combination of policy reform and active government interventions, the 26 case studies give cause for optimism that Africa’s “impressive” growth and development of the past decade can be sustained.