Kenya has been named Africa’s most competitive economy in the 2025 IMD World Competitiveness Ranking, placed 56th out of 69 countries in the annual assessment that measures how effectively nations convert economic, institutional and human resources into sustained productivity.
The ranking highlights governments and private sectors that delivered measurable projects and tightened fiscal and regulatory systems, reflected in concrete improvements across energy supply, port operations and digital services that fed into IMD’s 336 indicators.
Other African entrants include Botswana at 59th, Ghana at 61st, South Africa at 64th, Nigeria at 67th and Namibia at 68th. The results, released in the IMD 2025 Yearbook, point to a continental shift shaped by targeted infrastructure delivery, fiscal stabilization and digital rollouts that produced verifiable data rather than policy intentions.
The IMD Yearbook makes plain that this edition values delivery: scores are built from a mesh of official statistics and executive perceptions, emphasizing outcomes that can be tracked year-round. That methodological focus explains why only a small group of African states appear in the 2025 table of 69 economies, inclusion requires reliable, continuous datasets and verifiable project outputs, and why the narrative emerging from Africa is not about ambition but about measured, sometimes incremental, execution.
Kenya’s top continental position reflects a sequence of actions that translated into quantifiable improvements across IMD’s pillars. Fiscal consolidation and monetary steadiness reduced headline volatility and strengthened government-efficiency metrics; investments in Mombasa port handling capacity and selective independent power projects eased some of the throughput and electricity constraints that historically throttled business activity; and regulatory changes, from streamlined licensing to expanded digital identification, shortened administrative lead times and produced the kind of hard numbers IMD records.
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Radio Africa group’s ‘The star’ newspaper, reports that Kenya’s 56th place mirrors a constellation of deliverables: lower budget gaps, improved port turnaround, and measurable increases in on-grid and embedded capacity. These are the tangible shifts that moved Kenya ahead of regional peers.
Botswana’s position at 59th underlines a contrasting but familiar template: decades of fiscal restraint and transparent resource management that yield steady, if not spectacular, competitiveness gains. IMD’s indicators register Botswana’s disciplined revenue management from diamond exports and consistent public-investment programming, which buttress government-efficiency scores.
However, the country’s narrow domestic market and dependence on mineral rents remain binding constraints on scalability; the data show improvements in administrative reliability and transport links, but not yet the structural diversification that would lift business-efficiency scores toward higher bands.
Ghana’s placement at 61st is tied to its IMF-supported macro adjustment and a series of implementable projects that strengthened data flows and service reliability. Fiscal consolidation under the Extended Credit Facility tightened spending controls and raised the quality of fiscal reporting, while energy and logistics projects delivered measurable uptime and throughput improvements.
Digitalization efforts, including national ID and payment infrastructure, contributed to shorter administrative times and higher compliance rates. Still, Ghana’s public-debt profile and the limited scale of its industrial base constrain how far these gains translate into higher scores across IMD’s workforce and productivity subfactors.
South Africa’s 64th position is instructive because it juxtaposes institutional depth with operational fragility. The country’s judicial independence, mature capital markets and regulatory capacity bolster high scores in government and business efficiency; simultaneously, persistent infrastructure degradation, notably in bulk logistics and a power system that has oscillated between crisis and partial stabilization, drags on productivity measures.
Recent policy moves to open the grid to private generation and to introduce private-sector participation in port terminals have begun to show in technical performance indicators, but IMD’s scoring still reflects the residual effects of years of underinvestment and governance fragmentation at subnational levels.
Nigeria’s appearance at 67th is a reminder that scale and data availability alone do not guarantee higher competitiveness without consistent execution. The country’s reforms on subsidy rationalization, exchange-rate unification efforts and enhancements to tax administration created clearer fiscal statistics and improved transparency, which appear in IMD’s government-efficiency measures.
At the same time, unresolved electricity shortfalls, high operating costs and gaps in vocational skills limit productivity gains recorded under business-efficiency and infrastructure pillars. IMD rewards the observable correction of these constraints; Nigeria’s 2025 result captures a large economy in transition but still subject to structural drag.
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Namibia’s ranking at 68th reflects incremental, execution-focused advances in energy and maritime logistics that created the verifiable metrics IMD requires. The expansion of Walvis Bay’s handling capacity, faster approvals for independent power producers and targeted transmission upgrades reduced measured dependency on imported electricity and shortened vessel turnaround times, outcomes that register in infrastructure and trade facilitation indicators. For a market of Namibia’s size, such outcomes matter because IMD’s methodology privileges documented improvements over theoretical blueprints.
Taken together, these six cases show a common truth: the 2025 IMD framework privileges systems that can generate continuous, audited data and demonstrable project results. Where reforms produced measurable uptime at a power plant, fewer days lost to port congestion or improved fiscal reporting, those countries gained.
Where reform remained episodic or confined to strategy documents, IMD’s signal was less forgiving. The Yearbook’s emphasis on execution exposes a practical nexus between sustainability objectives and competitiveness: energy reliability, logistics efficiency and digital governance are not separate policy streams but the operational backbone of climate-resilient growth and private-sector viability.
That nexus matters for sustainability financing and infrastructure planning on the continent. Lenders and investors increasingly scrutinize not just policy frameworks but evidence of delivery: predictable cash flows from ports and power plants, transparent fiscal accounts and digital tools that reduce revenue leakage.
The IMD results therefore have an immediate fiscal and market consequence, they shape investor perception and the terms at which capital is extended for greenfield renewables, port concessions or regional transmission projects. For countries that can show year-on-year improvements in uptime, throughput and public-account transparency, borrowing costs and private-partnership appetite are likely to be more favorable.
For planners and investors focused on sustainability, the 2025 IMD snapshot offers a practical checklist: strengthen public accounts and audit trails, prioritize projects that deliver measurable service improvements within reporting cycles, and deploy digital governance tools that create auditable transaction records.
You can find the IMD 2025 World Competitiveness Ranking, here and peruse through the year book, here.
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