• Rwanda ranks first in Africa in the World Bank’s Business Ready 2025 with a score of 67.94.
• Benin and Senegal enter Africa’s Top 10 for the first time in the B-Ready ranking.
• The World Bank says countries with the greatest job-creation needs show the weakest business climates.

Rwanda remains Africa’s most business-friendly country, according to the Business Ready 2025 (B-Ready) report published in late December 2025 by the World Bank. This edition marks the second release of the ranking, which replaced the Doing Business index suspended in 2021 after data irregularities emerged in the 2018 and 2020 editions.

The World Bank designed B-Ready as a new data collection and analytical initiative to assess the global business and investment climate. The methodology relies mainly on surveys of 58,000 firms and 5,000 experts across 101 economies.

B-Ready provides a detailed dataset and a benchmark framework to identify factors that support private-sector development. However, the index goes beyond firm-level outcomes by incorporating worker welfare, consumer protection and environmental quality.

The framework combines de jure indicators, which measure laws and regulations, with de facto indicators, which capture real-world practices. This approach allows cross-country comparability while preserving national relevance.

The ranking covers 10 domains spanning a company’s life cycle, from creation and operation or expansion to closure or restructuring. These domains include business entry, location, utility services, labor, financial services, international trade, taxation, dispute resolution, market competition and insolvency. The assessment evaluates each domain through three pillars that reflect how governments support private-sector activity.

The first pillar assesses the regulatory framework governing business creation, operation and exit. The second pillar measures the quality of public services, including institutions and infrastructure that facilitate compliance, such as digital platforms, tax administrations and trade-related infrastructure.

Benin and Senegal enter Africa’s Top 10

The third pillar evaluates operational efficiency by measuring firms’ real experiences with procedures, delays and compliance costs. The World Bank assigns scores ranging from 0, the weakest, to 100, the strongest, for each pillar and domain. The aggregation of the three pillars produces the overall ranking.

In Africa, the World Bank covered 29 countries in the 2025 edition, up from 15 in 2024. New entrants include Benin, Senegal, Tunisia, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Rwanda ranks first on the continent with an overall score of 67.94. The country posted strong results in the regulatory framework pillar at 72.54 and in operational efficiency at 71.47, while it recorded a lower score of 59.81 in public service quality.

Morocco ranks second in Africa with a score of 63.44, while Mauritius slips one place to third with 63.20. Togo ranks fourth with 61.52. Two newcomers enter directly into Africa’s Top 10: Benin ranks fifth with a score of 60.21, and Senegal ranks ninth with 56.05. Among countries assessed in the first B-Ready edition, Ivory Coast holds the tenth position with a score of 54.43.

Overall, the B-Ready 2025 ranking shows that economies with the greatest need to create more and better jobs tend to post the weakest business climates. Countries with young labor forces and low growth rates lag the most. Sub-Saharan Africa hosts most economies with youthful populations, which exposes the region to higher risks linked to unfavorable business environments.

This article was initially published in French by Walid Kéfi

Adapted in English by Ange Jason Quenum