Magatte Wade

Magatte Wade is a US-based entrepreneur who manufactures products in Senegal that are sold at Whole Foods Markets, and director of the Center for African Prosperity at the Atlas Network. A leading advocate for entrepreneurship and economic freedom in Africa, she has spoken at the UN, the Aspen Institute, the Clinton Global Initiative and universities including MIT, Harvard and Yale. Forbes named her one of its “Twenty Young Power Women of Africa”.

Her book The Heart of a Cheetah argues that African poverty is not a shortage of resources or of talent but a consequence of the regulatory burden a young African meets trying to start anything, and that the fix is the boring one: make it possible to open and run a business.

She takes the cheetah generation from the Ghanaian economist George Ayittey, and her own companies, which manufacture in Senegal for export, are the working demonstration of the argument rather than an illustration of it.

She makes the moral case for special economic zones as a way to accelerate prosperity across the continent.