Media and the academia are partly to blame for outsiders misunderstanding the role of the domestic African private sector, says Oxford University doctoral candidate Zainab Usman.

The media have done an OK job spotlighting the exploits of tycoons such as Nigerian cement magnate Aliko Dangote, Sudanese telecoms giant Mo Ibrahim, and Zimbabwean telecoms entrepreneur Strive Masiyiwa, Usman said in a guest column in The Conversation.

But although African business owners have been powerful forces in African economies since the colonial period, they are often ignored in research and analysis, Usman said.

The academia and the media are, for the most part, stuck in a rut with reporting on the African private sector.

They focus on foreign investment, particularly China’s presence in Africa, but miss out a dynamic element of Africa’s ongoing economic transformation. This is not to say that there are no publications whatsoever on African enterprises, but they are very few and far between for the continent’s size.

African entrepreneurs are crucial to the growth of Africa’s economies. Many entrepreneurs currently operating across the continent have significant experience and are intrinsic to the complex process of economic diversification.

Reforms in a number of countries at the turn of the century energized existing companies to expand their interests across industries and borders, becoming big multinationals in financial services, telecommunications, entertainment, retail and hospitality.

From Nigeria and Ivory Coast to Kenya and Zambia, the economic crises of the 1980s preceded the decline of agro-industry, manufacturing and other productive sectors which were dominated by thriving, domestic private and state-owned enterprises.

The “Ivorian Miracle” or Ivory Coast’s golden age of economic prosperity between 1960 and the 1990s was built on cocoa exports and smallholder farming. The post-Cold War civil conflicts which ravaged countries such as Angola, Sierra Leone and Liberia, snuffed their nascent domestic private sectors.

Multinational corporations, development agencies and non-governmental organisations all stepped in, filling the investment gap that was left in the extraction industries and social services such as health and education. This economic decline was closely followed by a waning media and academic interest in African enterprises.

At the turn of the 21st century, privatization and economic liberalization brought a new wave of empowerment to African firms in industry, often with executives transitioning into business from careers in politics or the military.

As my new research on Nigeria points out, the country’s telecommunications revolution was powered by the African multinational telecoms firms, MTN and Econet, which had Nigerian shareholders. Some, such as MTN shareholder Colonel Sani Bello, were in the military. The telecoms industry in Nigeria grew by 1,000 percent in the first year after liberalization in 2001.

In the oil industry, local content laws empowered credible indigenous Nigerian oil companies such as Oando and Seplat, but also enabled rapacious newcomers such as Seven Energy and Atlantic Energy to enter the fray.

For example, DSTV, MTN and Shoprite are now South African multinationals ubiquitous across Africa – unleashed by the end of apartheid rule.

In financial services, some successful African firms cut their teeth through decades of trial and error, bankruptcies and mergers, and are now competing with foreign firms. UBA, Access Bank and other Nigerian banks used the springboard of reforms in the mid-2000s to recapitalize and expand across the continent alongside Ecobank and other big pan-African banks.

The entrepreneurs running these firms tend to have a longer planning horizon necessary for kick-starting industries that are not reliant on extractives. This is pivotal to economic diversification in Africa. Because they are often indigenous and so physically and psychologically invested in their operating environments, they have risk mitigation strategies which often elude their foreign counterparts.

Of course, indigenous companies can often descend into cronyism, rent-seeking and abuse of proximity to political power. Certain entrepreneurs have leveraged their proximity to power to lobby for favorable policies, tax breaks and market share, but also to expand across industries and countries.

With 95 percent market share, Safaricom, the force behind Kenya and East Africa’s mobile banking revolution is accused of monopolizing the mobile money market. So has Dangote, whose companies are often accused of undercutting local and foreign competitors in cement production.

Development agencies from the U.N.  to the African Development Bank have focused on improving the productivity of micro and small enterprises, which provide more than 45 percent of employment in sub-Saharan Africa. And Africa’s tech startups are never far from the headlines.

Recognizing the relationship between influential African conglomerates and the small companies in trade, cottage-industry manufacturing and agriculture is vital to understanding Africa’s ongoing economic transformation.

Links with powerful big businesses could enable smaller businesses to break into national and global markets.

Read more at The Conversation.