Africa: From Object to Agent of Socially Responsible Investment

Africa has been the stage for some of the most epic campaigns of the longstanding movement for socially responsible investment (SRI). Ethical investors were prominent voices in the struggle against the slave trade of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as crucial participants in the anti-apartheid campaign concerning South Africa, especially during the 1970s and 1980s. While Africa was essentially an object of, rather than an actor in, these ethical investment crusades, its seminal contribution appears often to be ignored or misunderstood in a movement that has tended to be associated primarily with the financial markets of Western Europe and North America. Africa has remained mostly on the periphery of the recent expansion of SRI activities worldwide, being neither a major market for social investors nor a rousing concern of the movement.