This pioneering collection seeks to understand why and how some digital enterprises in Africa progress while others firms either stagnate or regress. Using a range of detailed case studies, it addresses the challenges and barriers that are in place and how some outstanding digital firms deal with operating in a hostile business environment. While digital platforms have created equal access for small businesses, many digital entrepreneurs in Africa continue to struggle with local environments replete with corruption, and other economic inefficiencies. The contributions move the debate forward by addressing the challenges, opportunities, and prospects of digital enterprise in Africa. Placing special emphasis on how African new entrant digital firms are shaping the landscape and forging a new beginning for Africa, this book offers entrepreneurial perspectives to both researchers and policy-makers seeking to support and stimulate entrepreneurship in the new era.

The international business environment has undergone major turbulence in 2020 following the onset of lockdowns, travel restrictions and social distancing all prompted by Covid-19. These restrictions have limited the revenue generation capacity of both countries and businesses - large and small. While the winners have been mostly those sectors with a digital footprint such as streaming services and video-conferencing giants, the creative industries have felt a much harder blow. Against this backdrop, The Creative Industries and International Business Development in Africa takes an unorthodox approach to showcasing the trends and challenges of the contemporary creative economy with a view to positioning the sector for a global audience. Drawing upon the categorisations of the Creative Industries Federation, the book interrogates, and highlights, the challenges, and opportunities of the creative industries in Africa. This is with a view to aggregating how the sector has coped with a myriad of challenges even before the pandemic. Discussions across the chapters document the changing landscape of the sector, capturing insights from the global value chain to everything digital - from arts to publishing, fashion, film and music production and distribution. Further insights are discussed around recent events such as the take-off of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and the exit of Britain from the EU - with the latter event reinvigorating the Commonwealth Agenda and renewed interest in Africa's creative industries.

This book contributes to the ongoing discussion around entrepreneurship in Africa and how it can be made more sustainable. The chapters included highlight the need to consider the grey area between private and public sector dichotomy, which has been the focus of previous research efforts. The contributors to this book offer an intersectional view of entrepreneurship and widen the lens of inquiry to include informal sectors in discussions pertaining to innovation in business. The individual chapters consider economic and sociocultural contexts, the role of gender, the effect of militancy on entrepreneurship and informal small and medium enterprises. By doing so, this book argues that the neglect accorded to the informal and self-employment sectors may have hampered African business development in various ways. This book is a significant new contribution to studying informality in relation to business and entrepreneurship. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of business, economics, politics, sociology, public policy, and development studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of African Business.