We use cookies to enhance your browsing experience, serve personalized ads or content, and analyze our traffic. By clicking "Accept", you consent to our use of cookies. Read More
Introducing Dr. Aaron Nyanama, DBA alumnus of SSBM Geneva and author of The Unfinished Continent: How the African Mind Must Lead the Next Civilizational Leap, who challenges conventional narratives about Africa by highlighting its capacity for original innovation and leadership.
Dr. Nyanama offers a bold call for courage, imagination, and sovereignty, while inspiring current and future SSBM Geneva DBA students to pursue research that expands global understanding and redefines conventional thinking.
Thank you very much. The book is an invitation to rethink how Africa understands itself and how the world understands Africa. Rather than viewing the continent through the familiar lens of “catching up,” I argue that Africa’s strength lies in its ability to generate original pathways. I call that mutation rather than development.
Across the chapters, I examine how African societies are already producing new forms of governance, economic organization, and collective life that defy conventional models. The book challenges ideas that have long shaped global thinking, such as resilience, hope, and market fairness. It proposes courage, imagination, and epistemic sovereignty as the foundations of Africa’s next civilisational leap. It is both a critique of inherited paradigms and a constructive attempt to articulate a more ambitious horizon for the continent.
The DBA is an opportunity to cultivate a way of thinking, a way of approaching problems with curiosity, discipline, and openness to unconventional explanations.
The inspiration came from observing the gap between how Africa is often described and how Africans actually live, think, and innovate. Much of the global conversation still treats Africa as a place defined by deficiency. A region trying to become like others. But when you engage deeply with African entrepreneurs, community leaders, and institutions, you encounter a level of ingenuity that rarely appears in the formal narratives.
I wrote the book to dignify that ingenuity and to argue that Africa must trust its own intellectual and creative capacities. The continent is full of ideas that are not neatly captured by conventional development theory. I wanted to write a work that takes those ideas seriously and positions Africa not as an emerging follower, but as a potential source of civilisational leadership.
I chose SSBM Geneva because it offered the combination of academic discipline and practical relevance that I was looking for. I wanted a doctoral environment that allowed me to study African firm growth with methodological rigor, but also one that appreciated the complexities of doing business in emerging markets.
SSBM provided me that opportunity. Its international orientation, as well as its openness to diverse research approaches and emphasis on applying scholarship to real-world challenges, created the right intellectual setting for my work. It gave me the space to explore African economic realities without forcing them into pre-existing templates.
The DBA played a central role in shaping the book’s arguments. My research, which focused on how business owners’ cultural orientations influence SME growth in Africa, revealed that growth is not driven by technical factors alone. It is profoundly shaped by the values, worldviews, and decision-making logics that entrepreneurs bring into their firms. What is often labelled as “informality” or “intuition” is, in many cases, a culturally grounded way of managing risk, building trust, and navigating uncertainty.
This insight helped me recognize that African enterprises are not merely coping with constraints; they are expressing distinct cultural philosophies of entrepreneurship that deserve to be understood on their own terms. The doctorate trained me to see these patterns where others might see disorder, and to ask questions that move beyond conventional explanations of African business behaviour.
It also reinforced the importance of grounding big ideas in evidence. A lot of what I argue in the book, including the power of local knowledge systems, the creativity embedded in African economic life, and the need to rethink long-standing assumptions about how growth occurs, came directly from the intellectual discipline and analytical habits developed during my DBA journey.
My message would be that doctoral work matters far beyond the final dissertation. The DBA is an opportunity to cultivate a way of thinking, a way of approaching problems with curiosity, discipline, and openness to unconventional explanations.
I would encourage students to pursue questions that genuinely challenge them, to resist the temptation of safe research topics, and to treat their studies as a platform for intellectual contribution. I believe that a good DBA does not only produce a competent researcher; it produces someone who can illuminate complexity, question assumptions, and offer perspectives that deepen our understanding of the world.
In short, I would tell current DBA students to let their research not only answer questions, but expand the conversation.