The Countries That Refused to Make Excuses
Singapore in 1965 had no natural resources, no hinterland, a hostile regional environment, and a population fractured by ethnic tension. When the country was expelled from the Malaysian Federation, Lee Kuan Yew wept on national television. He then went ahead to build one of the most efficiently governed nations on earth.
That story is worth sitting with, because it is evidence that institutional quality is intentionally designed. It is the deliberate, sustained and mostly unglamorous choice made by leaders who decided that constraint is not an excuse and are able to use it to their advantage.
Sixty years later, Singapore’s per capita GDP exceeds $84,000. Its civil service is consistently ranked among the world’s most effective. Its public hospitals deliver outcomes that health systems in far wealthier nations struggle to match, and none of this happened by accident. It happened because Singapore decided, at a specific and difficult time, to build institutions that worked, and then held those institutions accountable for their work.
This is the conversation that every serious business operating in an emerging market needs to have with itself – what a disciplined response to a difficult environment looks like, and go beyond the debate of whether or not the environment is difficult.
The IMF and World Bank are aligned on Nigeria’s 2026 GDP growth forecast: 4.4%, driven by exchang rate reforms and improving investor confidence. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, growth is projected at 4.6%. Whilst that is forward movement, growth at 4.4% in an economy of 242 million people is not the same as transformation. The businesses that will define the next decade of African commerce are being built in this environment, with these constraints, by leaders who have decided that waiting for better conditions is not a success strategy.
Rwanda: An Example of Institutional Ambition
Rwanda is an example of a country that should not work. Landlocked, resource-poor, and emerging from a genocide that killed nearly a million people in a hundred days, the country had every reason to become a study in fragility. Instead, it has become one of the continent’s most- cited examples of deliberate institutional construction.
Rwanda consistently meets the African Union’s Abuja Declaration target of 15% of national budgets allocated to health, a commitment Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, has never met in 25 years. The IMF’s January 2026 World Economic Outlook cites Rwanda’s ‘macroeconomic stabilization and reform efforts’ as a key driver of Sub-Saharan Africa’s regional growth trajectory.
What Rwanda has built, which can be a masterclass for organizations of every size, is a culture of performance measurement that is genuinely consequential. Targets are not meant to be aspirational, they are supposed to be treated as contractual. Accountability is not a value statement, it is a meeting that happens periodically, in which someone has to explain what happened to the numbers. It is outcomes that are tracked, published, and acted upon.
The majority of organizations globally, not just in Africa, do not have that meeting for accountability. Rwanda built its national development around the assumption that they would.
The organizations winning in emerging markets are not the ones with the most resources. They are the ones that are execution-focused and take their own targets seriously.
