Doing Business in Burkina Faso
The export economy consists primarily of cotton. Other cash crops are oil seeds, leguminous vegetables, cane or beet sugar, peanuts, “karite” (shea nuts), cashews, mangos, and sesame seeds. With the largest concentration of shea nut trees in West Africa, the potential for exporting shea butter to markets in Europe and the United States is promising. Livestock, once a major export, has declined. Export-oriented light manufacturing industries are limited to cotton ginning, textiles, leather, agro foods production (e.g., sugar, wheat, and beer), and tobacco products.
Some factories are privately owned, while others are in the process of privatization. Traditional handicrafts such as leather handbags, saddles, woven cotton fabrics, and decorative objects of bronze and wood are a growing sector. Burkina Faso hosts the well-known biennial Ouagadougou International Arts and Crafts Fair (SIAO), which gives local producers the opportunity to network, display, and sell their products to tourists and potential foreign investors and distributors. With geological formations similar to its gold and mineral producing neighbors, Burkina Faso is considered by mining experts to be the country with the greatest untested mining potential in West Africa.
After the 2004 liberalization of the mining code, deposits of gold, manganese, zinc, and uranium have attracted significant interest from international mining firms. Tourism has grown in importance with events such as the biennial National Culture Week, the Pan-African Film Festival (the largest African film festival in the world); the SIAO international handicrafts fair; and scenic locations such as the country’s three national parks, offer a variety of activities and destinations for potential visitors. In recent years, Burkina Faso has been the site of several major international conferences; as a result, several new hotels, a conference center, and a video teleconferencing facility have been built in Ouagadougou.
Burkina Faso’s overall economic performance has remained basically sound despite several economic shocks during the past three years, including rising oil prices and food prices and a cotton sector crisis brought on in large part because of lower world cotton prices. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth was: 7.1 percent in 2005 and 5.5 percent in 2006. In 2007, higher costs of energy and imported foodstuffs, as well as low cotton
