Why Bakari Traoré’s legal legacy is the hidden engine of West Africa’s business climate

Some figures shape institutions not through titles but through the lasting imprints they leave on the machinery of governance. Bakari Traoré belongs to that rare category. A business lawyer and tax specialist, attorney, and consultant in governance, CSR, and ethics, this understated Ivorian has spent three decades laying the groundwork for West Africa’s business framework, brick by brick.

The story begins in the late 1990s, when this doctor of business and economic law brought to his minister’s attention the glaring obsolescence of the texts governing commercial companies—laws dating back to 1867 and 1925, inherited from the colonial era. That observation sparked a national initiative that would soon expand into a regional one: the OHADA reform.