Would anybody have any resources or direction to point me to?
Assuming this was fixed, though, I would recommend looking into infrastructure and technology products and services, especially those that are homegrown. These are what most countries need the most and the potential for their growth would be tremendous given the continent's population size.
infrastructure in africa is weird though, most of it goes from the resource rich lands to some port for export.
There is very little infrastructure between african nations in comparison, which hurts inter-african trade a lot, because it usually results in exporting to other countries being cheaper and using the resources to grow the trade between african nations.
Having an internal market (like the EU common market) allows for massive growth of the economies of different nations, it's a shame infrastructure for it does not exist (yet).
Again, it comes to leadership. Rwanda, as an example, has great business legislation but being a small, landlocked country it will be reliant on good legislation from its neighbours too in order to really blossom, and sadly this is largely missing.
i ask because one of the issues that india's legislators have is to create policies which can intelligently regulate a largely off-the-books economy. the results end up looking stupid and not being effective a lot of the time.
When the government's legislation is sometimes actively against your welfare as a citizen, I imagine you're much more likely to have off-the-books and informal business. Again, the lack of infrastructure in many places requires citizens to work around these problems and the larger sense of community in most African cultures also makes an informal economy more likely.
These are just anecdotal opinions, though, so take it with a large pinch of salt.
There's a Ryan Hoover (not the Product Hunt founder) that blogs about how to open a brokerage account as a foreigner in order to buy stocks in different countries:
Or these? https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/011316/afk-e...
I expect you would find that the biggest companies in most of Africa are either state owned mining and oil companies or western companies operating in Africa. I don't think they have many important publicly traded companies because their financial systems aren't well developed.
The three big ones there actually have a respectable amount of listings (Egypt 833, South Africa 402, Nigeria 223)
Obviously financial infrastructure varies a lot from country to country
Wow. I'm speechless - how did you arrive at that (incorrect) conclusion? Not only are there plenty of African stock exchanges[1], a lot of publicly traded companies opt to be (dually or exclusively) listed on foreign bourses.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African_stock_exchange...