Analyzing West Africa's digital transformation and digital services with the World Bank

In 2022-23, Nextrade Group continued our work with the World Bank to understand the digital transformation of firms and business ecosystems and how this shapes firms participation in trade, this time in West Africa.

The purpose of the project is to produce recommendations for the Western Africa Regional Digital Integration Program (WARDIP) component 3, which promotes the development and integration of West Africa’s regional digital market and the enabling environment for the cross-border digital sales of goods or services, especially through (1) regional small and medium enterprises’ (SMEs) digital transformation and (2) the development of digital services and digital service providers (DSPs) in the region.

In 2022, Nextrade produced:

Baseline data on the state and gaps in West African SMEs and digital service providers' digital transformation, and their needs for pursuing digital transformation for growing their businesses, based on a firm-level surveys with 909 SMEs and 360 digital service providers in five countries (Cote D’Ivoire, the Gambia, Ghana, Mauritania, and Nigeria).

An analysis of West Africa’s entrepreneurship support organizations (ESOs), especially to gauge their digital maturity and activities in support of digitizing SMEs and digital entrepreneurship. This deliverable is based on our mapping of 156 ESOs across 13 economies and 14 different dimensions, four of which are directly related to the ESOs’ digital maturity.