Prof. Douglas Boateng argues African leaders already know what works overseas, and the real deficit is follow-through at home.
African leaders and executives no longer lack exposure to well-run systems abroad, but they rarely bring the lessons home. That is the central argument of a new opinion column by Ing. Prof. Douglas Boateng, a governance, industrialisation and supply chain strategist who is a Chartered Director and Chartered Engineer in the United Kingdom and a Fellow of the Ghana Institution of Engineering.
Writing in the Daily Guide Network, Prof. Boateng describes a familiar cycle: delegations fly from Accra, Lagos, Nairobi or Lusaka to cities such as Singapore, Dubai, London, Tokyo or Copenhagen, attend a conference, take photographs, issue a communiqué and return home with little changed.
"Why are we not doing what we already know?"
His point is that geography no longer limits knowledge. Ministers, mayors, engineers and civil servants travel constantly, universities collaborate across borders, and the African diaspora works inside some of the world's most advanced institutions. The question, he writes, has shifted from what should be done to why it is not being done.
He cites Singapore, a favourite reference point for African officials. Drawing on World Bank material, he notes that Singapore moved from low-income status at independence in 1965 to a high-income economy, with growth averaging about seven per cent a year and close to nine per cent in its first twenty-five years. Between 1963 and 1975 it took fourteen World Bank loans for water, sewerage, electricity, telecommunications and ports, and repaid them by the mid-1980s. Its GDP per capita now sits near 98,000 US dollars, with effectively universal sanitation coverage.
The numbers at home
Prof. Boateng sets that against the continent's deficits. As of 2024, about 560 million people in sub-Saharan Africa were living without electricity, and the World Bank puts Africa's annual infrastructure financing gap at more than 100 billion dollars.
He argues the deeper problem is maintenance rather than construction. Commissioning ceremonies attract cameras; repairing blocked drains, failed streetlights and faded road markings does not.
He also points to behaviour, noting that the same person who litters at home obeys rules abroad. The difference, he says, is enforcement and system design, not character.
Business and trade
The column does not spare the private sector. Executives who tour world-class factories, he writes, return home to late payments to small suppliers and governance shortcuts. He cites UN Trade and Development figures putting small and medium enterprises at roughly 80 per cent of employment in Africa, and intra-African trade at only about 16 per cent of the continent's exports, despite the African Continental Free Trade Area's potential 3.4 trillion dollar market.
His proposed fix is practical: every delegation should file an implementation note instead of a travel report, stating what was learned, what applies locally, who will act on it, and what actually changed twelve months later.
Reported first by Daily Guide Network on 2026-09-18. This article was written for our readers based on that report. Follow the link for the original coverage.
