Evaluating Business Environment in Africa Using Grey Number Weights

Investing in Africa is a very complex decision-making when considering a lot of forces that affect business operations. This paper proposes a multi-criteria decision making method based on the Grey System Theory to evaluate the business environment in Africa under a group decision environment. We use grey linguistic values represented by grey numbers to evaluate the weights of evaluation criteria. The Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) based on grey numbers is used to aggregate the different weights of experts. Rank Order Centroid (ROC) weights are used to convert the rankings of criteria into weights. After weighting, we use the traditional GRA to rank 17 sample countries using the data obtained from the African Development Bank and the Doing Business Project initiated by the World Bank. These 17 countries are classified into three groups, and South Africa is ranked the first position in Africa based on the preferences of our investors.