The Advocacy Challenge Map
The Challenge
​
Information Asymmetry
between North American capital
and African opportunity has
a negative effect on foreign
direct investment
The Ideal
_____________________
​
A time when perception
does not exact too-high a
transaction cost on African
opportunities
The Products
_____________________
​
Thought-leadership & strategic communication interventions and campaigns to promote investment-ready products & services
The Solution
_____________________
Prioritize elementary Information, Education and Communication attributes to lead to behavioral change campaigns on North American direct investment
Notes
The main motivation for including transaction cost in this discussion is that one can use the theory to partially rationalize the current low amounts of United States direct investment to sub-Saharan Africa. Simply: If transaction costs of internationalizing to sub-Saharan Africa could be ‘absorbed’ by multinational enterprises on top of production costs, these MNEs would more freely expand to the region. Similarly, if American and sub-Saharan African policymakers that currently belong to a ‘low-transaction-cost group’ incurred ‘high-transaction-costs’
in passing policy to lower transaction costs for multinational enterprises, United States direct investment
abroad to Africa would flow at a much higher rate than it does within the status quo.