Julian Simon Award winner Magatte Wade talks about what has held Africa back and what it needs to prosper.
Julian Simon Award winner Magatte Wade talks about what has held Africa back and what it needs to prosper.
P eople don’t want to leave their homes. Magatte Wade understands this well. Born in Senegal, she grew up in France with her parents. When her grandmother died, she wasn’t able to go back to Senegal for her funeral. Like countless immigrants around the world, she left her native culture, her native language, and her family — the closest ties that bind humans to one another — because her native country did not provide opportunities to prosper.
Wade has prospered. An entrepreneur, she has started multiple companies that make products in Africa and sell them in the United States. And she wants more Africans to prosper. She wants more Africans to be able to say, as she says, “Free enterprise is my birthright as an African.”
Today Wade is being awarded the Julian L. Simon Memorial Award from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a free-market think tank in Washington, D.C. The award is named for the economist who wrote The Ultimate Resource, a book about human ingenuity, and who won a famous wager with Paul Ehrlich by betting that natural resources would become more abundant, not scarcer.
“To me, it’s a tremendous honor, especially given what Julian Simon stood for,” said Wade in an interview with National Review. “He believed human beings are not a minus but are a plus.”
Wade stresses that according to demographic trends, by 2050, one-quarter of the world’s human beings will be Africans. “My continent is still the poorest in the world,” she says.
Wade says this is largely the consequence of overregulation. She gave a TED talk in 2017 about tariffs, laws, and regulations that make it nearly impossible for African entrepreneurs to start businesses. Because there are no businesses, there are no jobs, and because there are no jobs, Africans risk their lives to flee to Europe or the U.S., she said.
Government by far-off colonial powers was replaced in most African countries by socialism. The socialism was learned from the West and then passed off by intellectuals as authentically African. Wade describes to NR how the African concept of “ubuntu,” which means “I am because we are,” was transformed into support for socialism that has little to root it in actual African history. Wade said that one of her employees, a 22-year-old who just completed his education in Senegal, said students are still taught Marxism.
The economist who most influenced Wade was George Ayittey. He was from Ghana and died in 2022. “George’s work liberated me from that,” Wade said, referring to socialism.
Ayittey studied pre-colonial Africa and found deep traditions of markets and freedom, not the despotism that has characterized recent African history. He argued that economic planning, both by African governments and by Western governments pursuing “economic development” programs, is holding Africa back.
“My goal is for George’s name to enter the history books,” Wade says. While many Western academics as well as activists such as Bono are only now coming around to the fact that markets and trade are the solution to Africa’s poverty, Ayittey was there decades ago.
“What I see all over Africa is markets everywhere,” Wade says. “And they have been dominated by women and still are.”
That part might sound surprising, but the centrality of women in pre-colonial Africa was one of the things that Europeans found “uncivilized.” Most African societies are matrilineal, and women had veto power over tribal officials.
In the marketplaces today in Senegal and elsewhere, Wade says, most of the people engaged in trade are women. It’s difficult to quantify because nearly all business in African countries is done informally. The relatively miniscule formal sector tends to be dominated by men — and by cronyism. The entrepreneurs, to the extent they exist, tend to be women like Wade.
She figured out ways to succeed by making products in Africa and selling them in the United States. Consumers today, especially American consumers, she notes, are more conscious of how products are made and want them to reflect their values.
Wade’s cosmetics company, SkinIsSkin, uses all-natural and organic ingredients, including ones that are sourced from Africa that other companies don’t use. “I have a clientele that sees a premium in my products,” she says, and because they are willing to pay more, it allows her to be profitable even with all the hurdles the Senegalese government puts in her way.
That’s obviously not repeatable for most businesses. “I had to go to the head of the customs office and go through binders and binders of rules and laws,” she tells me. Many companies pay bribes. Wade stresses that this is not an inherently African flaw but merely a consequence of the fact that African countries are so overregulated that loopholes, personal connections, and bribes are often the only ways to start businesses.
Wade has been talking to several African governments about what they need to escape poverty. She summarizes it in a simple formula: “Poverty is solved by prosperity. Prosperity is built by entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs need a business environment where they can succeed.”
That point is easy enough to understand. The problem is that current African governments benefit from the status quo, and the sheer quantity of laws that need to be changed is daunting.
The solution Wade advocates is what she calls “start-up cities.” These would be special economic zones in African countries where business laws start from scratch. It would allow African people to create friendly environments for entrepreneurship while allowing the governments to “try before they buy.”
Supporting such cities should be part of U.S. foreign policy in Africa, she argues. “You’re not going to win over the hearts and minds of young Africans with foreign aid and military bases.”
As she points out, Chinese and Russians are now all over Africa looking to do business, and Africa has the youngest population in the world. Hundreds of millions of Africans are looking to escape poverty, and the U.S., she says, should not want them to grow up exposed primarily to Chinese and Russian business efforts.
Many in the West have given up on Africa, Wade feels. In one sense, she says, she doesn’t blame them for thinking that way. “We have gotten trillions in aid. We have nothing to show for it.” But that’s because foreign aid is not the way to prosperity, and it never was.
“People would say I’m instinctively a free-marketeer, but it took me a while to realize that the free-market world was a thing,” Wade says. She is the director of the Center for African Prosperity at the Atlas Network, a global group of free-market think tanks. Since getting involved with free-market advocacy, she said, she has realized how meaningful the Simon Award is. “For CEI to do that in a world where almost everyone has given up on Africa — I will never thank them enough.”
Free markets have worked in Hong Kong, Singapore, and every other formerly poor place where they have been tried, she says, adding: “In my lifetime, I will see a prosperous Africa.” And then future entrepreneurs like her won’t have to leave Africa to succeed. They can prosper at home, alongside their families, by making good use of their birthright to free enterprise.