The Center encourages collaboration and dialogue with the business community, both on campus and beyond, with a goal of raising awareness about African economic issues and opportunities. We are collaborate with the Haas Africa Business Forum, a student run annual event at UC Berkeley. Another recent venture is the Berkeley Stanford Africa Innovators (BeSt AI) Series in which we collaborated with the Center for African Studies at Stanford, P1 Ventures and Nala in an online series of conversations with alumni who are changemakers across the African continent. We work regular with the African Diaspora Network on programming such as their Investment Symposium.
On campus, the International Business Development (IBD) at the Haas School of Business is an enormously successful MBA student consulting project with an increasing presence in Africa. Haas MBA students, in small teams, work with corporate and non-profit clients on real projects in overseas locations. For instance, Haas students have conducted several studies for Ashesi University, a private, nonprofit, nonsectarian university in Ghana. Other teams have worked on a microcredit project in Zimbabwe, Internet projects in Senegal, and other projects in Cameroon, Madagascar, Tanzania, and South Africa.
Another good resource is the Doing Business in Africa page of the International Trade Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce. It serves as a clearinghouse for information.
For useful links on economic and business issues in Africa, go to the pages on business and development on Karen Fung's Africa South of the Sahara website.