The criteria for the awards are as follows:

The following are the criteria which will guide both our dedicated research consultants and our Awards Selection Jury:

1) Local value added
This criterion will establish the proportion of the total value in a made in Africa product that was actually added on in Africa itself rather than imported from outside the continent.

2) Employment generation
This criterion will measure the capacity and commitment of a nominated enterprise to create local employment for Africans

3) Health Safety & Environment
This criterion will assess each nominee’s commitment to and actual practices with regards to the health and safety of both employees and third party visitors to production facilities, as well as the environmental friendliness of the production processes involved.

4) Price competitiveness
This will assess the price competitiveness of the products of nominated products against other Africa- produced substitutes and alternatives imported from other parts of the world.

5) Quality competitiveness
This will assess the quality competitiveness of the products of nominated products against other Africa- produced substitutes and alternatives imported from other parts of the world.

6) Product/service innovation/relevance
This will assess the innovation of the product’s use, design, packaging and distribution with the relevance of the product to the target market being the primary consideration in this regard.

7) Market visibility and accessibility
This will assess the visibility of the nominee’s products on domestic - and where applicable export – markets, the intensity of their marketing efforts and the actual availability of the products to the market markets.

8) Corporate governance practice
Good corporate governance counts as one of our key assessment factors, particularly with regards to board/management relations and delegation of managerial duties to competent subordinates as well as relationships with staff, shareholders and other stakeholders such as financiers, suppliers etc.

9) Regulatory compliance
The degree of compliance of a company to legal requirements could be regarded as a part of good corporate governance but due to the generally poor level of compliance by many member companies of corporate Africa we have elected to treat it as a separate aspect for the purposes of this award scheme.

10) Corporate/Institutional Performance
This obviously is a key criterion, corporate/institutional performance, in this case being measured by pertinent outcomes from among quantitative key performance indicators: Importantly however, because most of the nominations are on behalf of private companies whose financial statements are not readily available, in some cases not all these KPIs can be used. Consequently we use only the available KPIs without penalizing nominations for not having the unavailable ones forwarded to us. Thus, in each case, the total score available under this criterion is the same, no matter how many of the KPIs are used. While this may have a distortionary effect, we consider it the most fair way to proceed with this aspect of our assessments. Nevertheless, where a nominee is found to have deliberately hidden a KPI from the organizers because it is perceived to be unfavourable to the assessment of the nominee, that KPI is included in the assessment with the nominee deemed to have scored zero in that particular KPI.

Each shortlisted nomination is discussed by the awards jury in order to share perspectives, except in the case of corporate/institutional assessment which is entirely quantitative and indeed is handled by our research consultants rather than the awards jury. After the sharing of perspectives, each juror assigns his or her own score for each aspect. However where an individual jurors score is markedly points higher or lower than the average for that nominee in a particular aspect a joint review may be held . But if the juror stands his or her ground, it is accepted for the sake of cohesion within the Jury as a group.