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Gabon aims to significantly increase its domestic food security by 2020, while also working to expand its cash crop exports. An integral part of efforts to diversify the economy away from dependence on oil, successful implementation of its agricultural strategy will have a major impact on its balance of payments and generate significant employment growth. The government has initiated a wide-...

As with many of Africa’s emerging markets, a number of challenges face Gabon’s insurance sector, including low insurance awareness, a small domestic client base and declining oil production. And yet the Gabonese market remains one of the largest in the sub-region, and it is set to expand in the coming years as the demand for personal insurance lines increases. Despite its modest size, the local...

The Central African Stock Exchange (Bourse Régionale des Valeurs Mobilières d’Afrique Centrale, BVMAC), headquartered in Libreville, is one of two regional bourses – both of which are located in CFA zones – on the African continent. The past few years have seen only occasional activity on the bourse, in spite of the region’s improving headline growth and the sizeable expansion plans of some of...

While Gabon’s banking sector is one of the more developed in the Economic Community of Central African States, penetration lags behind its sub-Saharan African peers. Banking assets accounted for 21% of GDP in 2012, according to the IMF, while the private sector’s ratio of credit to GDP stood at 11% (19% of non-oil GDP). As of April 2013 there were just over 266,000 accounts for 1.5m people. Yet...

Over the last 50 years Gabon’s economy has been largely dependent on oil extraction and this continues to be true today. After reaching peak oil production in 1997, with an average of 370,000 barrels per day (bpd), maturing oil fields and slowing discovery rates have resulted in a decline in output to 245,000 bpd in 2012. Oil companies are embarking on major investment programmes to help boost...

The past 40 years of oil production have turned this small but strategically positioned Central African state into an upper middle-income economy. The country’s extractive industries are sizeable by global standards, with oil, timber and manganese being key exports. Following the 2008-09 financial crisis, GDP growth provided evidence of a recovery, reaching 7% in 2011 and 5% in 2012, according to...