I found this interesting from Reuters

“With the stoicism demanded of all who hope to make money in Africa, Beauty Chama sits in her empty hair salon in a leafy town in northern Zambia’s Copper Belt and looks forward to better times. “We are waiting patiently until the miners start making their money,” she said, fingering the heavy gold chain around her neck that testifies to past fat years. “Then we shall start making our money. It’s only a matter of time.”

Africa for the investor is like that: a story of boom and bust, where famine and disease are punctuated by coups and civil wars. For many, its tales of war and diamonds, tribal rivalries, plundered treasuries and secret Swiss bank accounts make it too risky. Somalia is fast approaching its third decade without a functional central government, and the prolonged ill-health of Nigerian President Umaru Yar’Adua has created a troubling power vacuum in Africa’s most alluring frontier market.

But after the implosion of such supposedly sophisticated or promising institutions as Lehman Brothers or Dubai World, the confidence of the Zambian hairdresser is finding echoes as far away as London, New York and Beijing. The International Monetary Fund believes growth in sub-Saharan Africa will be 1 percentage point above the global average, and puts eight African countries in its top 20 fastest-expanding economies in 2010. Oil-rich Angola and Congo Republic will lead the charge with growth rates of more than 9 and 12 percent respectively, both beating China, according to the IMF’s most recent projections.

“Africa,” said Tara O’Connor of Africa Risk Consulting, “is the continent of the long game. It’s not perfect, but the overarching trend is one toward entrenching political stability, which then allows businesses to operate much more consistently.” For some African countries, particularly those helped by Chinese investment and its thirst for energy and minerals, another boom may be approaching.

Investors with cheap cash needing to spice up returns in more obscure parts of the globe are asking whether Africa can shift from final investment frontier into the emerging market mainstream. Reflecting this interest, Africa gets top billing at the annual meeting of the rich and powerful in Davos this week. “Not investing in Africa is like missing out on Japan and Germany in the 1950s, Southeast Asia in the 1980s and emerging markets in the 1990s,” said Francis Beddington, head of research at emerging market investment house Insparo Capital.

He believes that in the long term, Africa has the potential to be home to a sizeable chunk of the factories and warehouses of tomorrow’s world. The Africa of old — aid-dependent, and with large tracts of the economy controlled by corrupt and capricious governments — has not disappeared. But for all the previous false dawns, there is a growing belief that the continent — home to 53 countries, a rapidly urbanizing young population of a billion people and as much as a third of the world’s natural resources — is changing.”

Hope yet?