Navigating Geopolitical Risk through Shared Value: South Africa 2027
Course Description
For decades, multinational corporations operating in African markets benefited from a structural safety net: development assistance funded by the United States, the European Union, and other traditional partners that underwrote health systems, educational institutions, rule of law, and social infrastructure. Today, that foundation is eroding. For the first time in a generation, official development assistance (ODA) is contracting across nearly all major donor governments simultaneously, reflecting fiscal pressures, domestic political constraints, and changing geopolitical priorities. This broad-based retrenchment comes amid a succession of geopolitical shocks that have already strained state capacity and market resilience. As foreign assistance budgets shrink and Western donors retreat, firms are discovering that the erosion of development investment is not solely a social issue, but rather, a material challenge for sustainable operations.
This course sits at the intersection of geopolitics, international development, and business strategy. It examines how these shifts in the global development architecture are reshaping what effective private sector engagement looks like in African markets — and whether Creating Shared Value (CSV), the idea that firms embed social investment directly into how they compete and operate rather than layering it on top, is better suited to the current geopolitical context than the models that came before it.
Through deep-dive country analysis, executive briefings, field research, and direct engagement with African executives and policymakers, students investigate how firms in energy, finance, agriculture, healthcare, and extractives balance profit objectives with survival as de facto political stakeholders. This course recasts social investment as a strategic and often existential business function — critical to firms' resilience and long-term competitiveness in markets where CSV is inseparable from business continuity, political risk management, and license to operate.
Upon completing this course, students will be able to:
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Identify, categorize, and weight political, institutional, and geopolitical risks as inputs to business decision-making — including how shifts in great-power competition, development finance, and state capacity affect firm strategy across African markets.
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Apply the Creating Shared Value framework to assess whether a firm's social investment is structurally embedded in its business model or peripheral to it — and under what conditions CSV generates competitive advantage versus remaining aspirational.
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Evaluate how firms in sectors including energy, finance, agriculture, healthcare, and extractives design and adapt their models when state capacity is uneven, development finance is in flux, and the external operating environment is volatile.
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Identify structural dynamics — the systemic contraction of development assistance, the public-private coordination gap, the role of trust-based distribution — that cut across industries and geographies, enabling students to transfer analytical insights to their own professional contexts.
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Develop and deliver evidence-based assessments of operating environments and firm strategy in emerging markets, integrating political, economic, and social analysis into recommendations relevant to business, investment, and policy audiences.
Who should take this class?
MBA students preparing for careers in global strategy, impact investing, or international consulting will spend their careers navigating markets where geopolitics, development, and business strategy are inseparable. The continent of Africa is where that reality is sharpest right now, and the conditions are growing more consequential by the year. Africa is central to the global economy: it holds the world's largest youth population, the critical minerals essential to the green energy transition, and some of the most consequential innovations in financial inclusion, agriculture, and healthcare. At the same time, the systemic contraction of Western development assistance is reshaping the operating environment for firms across sectors, altering the assumptions that have long underpinned market entry, risk pricing, and long-term investment. This course is one of the few places in the MBA curriculum where students can study these dynamics in real conditions, with access to the executives navigating them.
Faculty Bio
Dr. Lesley Anne Warner has two decades of experience as a foreign policy expert at the intersection of political transitions, stabilization, and security cooperation. She was most recently a Deputy Assistant Administrator in the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where she oversaw the Anti-Corruption Center; Justice, Rights, and Security office; and the Program Office, which handled the Bureau’s budget, communications, and legislative engagement. While at the DRG Bureau, she represented the U.S. Government in engagements with foreign officials, implementing partners, and members of civil society in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and was part of the executive leadership team that oversaw a foreign assistance budget
of $261 million across 72 countries to advance efforts to protect human rights defenders and mitigate democratic backsliding.
Dr. Warner was previously a Senior Policy Advisor to U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield, where she served as her principal adviser on Sub-Saharan Africa. During her time at USUN, she originated the concept behind the African Democratic and Political Transitions (ADAPT) Initiative, which became a deliverable for the U.S.-African Leaders' Summit in 2022. From 2015 to 2021, Dr. Warner was a Senior Professional Staff Member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where she served as the principal adviser to Chairmen Eliot Engel and Gregory Meeks on Sub-Saharan Africa. While on the Committee, she authored the Sudan Democratic Transition, Accountability, and Financial Transparency Act of 2020, which became law as part of the FY21 National Defense Authorization Act.
Dr. Warner holds a PhD in War Studies from King’s College London, a M.A. in Security Studies from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and a B.A. in International Relations from Carleton College, where she was awarded the Boren National Security Education Program Scholarship and a Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Research Fellowship. She is the author of Military Integration during War-to-Peace Transitions: South Sudan’s Attempt to Manage Armed Groups, 2006-13, Routledge, 2023, and her research and analysis have been widely published and cited in prominent international television, radio, print, and online outlets. Dr. Warner is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a 2018 Next Generation National Security Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and an International Career Advancement Program (ICAP) Fellow.