Twenty-four miles northwest of Accra in Ghana, Anthony Botchway rips a pineapple plant from the ground with his bare hands. Wearing dirty boots, a short-sleeved shirt and jeans, he looks like any other farmworker, in a region where the daily minimum wage is less than $2.

The difference is that Botchway owns 7.2 million of the pulpy, yellow fruits. He rose from poverty to become managing director of Bomarts Farms Ltd., which owns and cultivates 3,000 acres (1,200 hectares) of land, partly because he got financial help, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its June issue.

Ecobank Transnational Inc. (ETI), which operates in more African countries than any other bank, provided an initial loan of $50,000 in 2002. Since then, Botchway has gone from peddling goods on village streets to exporting his extra-sweet pineapples to Europe and the Middle East.

“Any time I request a loan from Ecobank, I get something,” the sinewy Botchway, 53, says with a smile at his farm in Nsuobiri. “Though I may not get everything, it frees funds for growth that would otherwise have been used to pay salaries and bills.” He plans to double production to 14 million pineapples in the next few years.

In Africa, a continent that has been synonymous with poverty, corruption and lagging development, an increasing number of people like Botchway are improving their economic standing. Sub-Saharan Africa will be the fastest-growing region in the world, after developing Asia, this year and in 2012, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Fastest-Growing

Six of the 20 projected fastest-growing countries this year are in Africa. Among them are Ghana, at 13.7 percent; Ethiopia, at 8.5 percent; Angola, at 7.8 percent; and Mozambique, at 7.5 percent, the IMF says.

A move toward freer economies helped ignite the boom. In the past decade, leaders in Nigeria, Ghana and Rwanda have sold state-owned industries, cut inflation and budgeted more cautiously. Those shifts encouraged the Group of Eight nations to agree in 2005 to let the World Bank, the IMF and the African Development Bank cancel the debts of some poor countries provided they met certain economic goals.

China’s surging demand for copper, platinum and iron ore has also fueled African economies. Today, the world’s most populous country is the African continent’s biggest trading partner.

The strong growth in the region comes on a very low base. Poverty remains widespread: About 400 million Africans lived on less than $1.25 a day in 2009, the World Bank estimates, while 200 million were unemployed. Corruption is still ingrained. Six of the 10 most corrupt countries in the world are in Africa, according to Berlin-based Transparency International.

Nigeria Violence

Political stability remains elusive in such countries as Ivory Coast, where President Laurent Gbagbo clung to power for four months after losing an election to Alassane Ouattara. Gbagbo was dislodged in April with the aid of French and United Nations military forces. In Nigeria, at least 600 people have died in the predominantly Muslim north in violence triggered by the April 16 re-election of President Goodluck Jonathan, said the Kaduna-based Civil Rights Congress.

Still, more Africans are becoming less poor. By 2015, 221 million African consumers will advance from destitution to basic-needs status, making from $1,000 to $5,000 a year, according to a McKinsey & Co. analysis of data from IHS Global Insight, a subsidiary of Englewood, Colorado-based data provider IHS Inc.

There’s more prosperity to come, says Arnold Ekpe, chief executive officer of Ecobank, which has expanded into 32 of Africa’s 53 countries from its base in Lome, the capital of French-speaking Togo.

Retail Lending

The bank increased retail lending more than fivefold from 2005 to 2010, to $5.3 billion, in the region Ekpe calls Middle Africa–spanning from Kenya in the east to Guinea-Bissau in the west and from just below the Sahara to just above South Africa.

“Middle Africa is the fastest-growing part of Africa, and it’s also some of the richest parts of Africa,” Ekpe says. “That’s where the oil, the diamonds, the iron ore and the gold are.”

The 32 countries in Middle Africa as defined by Ekpe are together expected to grow 6.5 percent in 2011, based on a weighted average derived by Bloomberg from IMF statistics.

The doubling of the Standard & Poor’s GSCI index of 24 raw materials since 2005 explains much of Africa’s boom. The continent contains the world’s biggest deposits of platinum, diamonds and manganese. It’s also a significant producer of oil, coal, copper and bauxite, which is used to make aluminum.

Growth Without Minerals

Commodities can’t explain all of Africa’s growth, though. Gross domestic product rose more than 5 percent last year in such East African nations as Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda, which all lack the mineral wealth of western and southern Africa.

National leaders are altering economic policies to avoid past mistakes, says Paul Collier, director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University and author of “The Bottom Billion” (Oxford University, 2007).

“If you go back 10 years ago, these countries were highly indebted, with very stressed fiscal positions,” he says. “Now, they’ll be the envy of any European country.”

In Nigeria, for instance, government debt is 16 percent of GDP, compared with 130 percent in Greece, 94 percent in Ireland and 83 percent in Portugal, according to IMF figures. In 2004, the government of Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo started basing its budget on oil at $23 a barrel to ensure that price declines wouldn’t cause deficits to soar.

Arrears Repaid

Any excess was saved in a separate account that enabled the country to repay $6 billion in borrowing arrears, helping secure $18 billion of relief on debt that totaled $36 billion in 2004.

From 1999 to 2006, Nigeria sold off more than 116 state- owned enterprises, according to McKinsey. President Jonathan is selling power generation and distribution companies this year to expand capacity and end chronic electricity shortages.

Nigeria’s central bank has been a trailblazer for economic change. In 2009, amid a 46 percent slump in local stocks and a halving of oil prices, Nigerian banks were left with $10 billion of bad debts on their books.

Lamido Sanusi, the central bank governor, fired the CEOs of eight of the nation’s 24 lenders and pumped the equivalent of $4 billion into ailing institutions. Later, he created an entity to buy the debt.

“I was shocked by the magnitude of the debt crisis,” Sanusi says in an interview in his office in Abuja. “Cleaning up the system and making sure people were held to account was our contribution to reforming the industry.”

‘Top Reformer’

The turnaround has been especially striking in Rwanda, the landlocked coffee-producing country that was devastated by a 1994 genocide. About 800,000 people, most of them members of the Tutsi minority, were killed. Today, Rwanda’s economy is growing at 5.9 percent annually, and much of the infrastructure destroyed during the killings has been rebuilt.

In 2009, the World Bank named Rwanda the “top reformer” for making the most business-friendly changes to its regulations. It takes just three days to register a company in Rwanda, compared with an average of 45 days in sub-Saharan Africa and 13.8 days in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, the World Bank says.

Ecobank is just one of the many banks trying to tap into this economic growth. Citigroup Inc. (C), Standard Chartered Plc (STAN), Bank of America Corp. (BAC)’s Merrill Lynch and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) all plan to expand in Africa.

Mobius Buys Nigeria

Mark Mobius, the Singapore-based executive chairman of Templeton Asset Management’s Emerging Markets Group, has been buying shares of Nigerian banks.

“Hitting on banks is the first step” toward reaching Africa’s growing middle class, says Mobius, whose $1 billion Frontier Markets Fund had 12.3 percent of its investments in Nigeria at the end of 2010. The fund, which returned 74 percent from its inception in 2008 to the end of 2010, owns shares in Nigeria’s United Bank for Africa Plc and Zenith Bank Plc. (ZENITHBA)

Ecobank, founded in 1985, is one of the few private lenders based in and focused on Middle Africa. Ekpe, 57, says the bank aims to cater to working people and smaller companies, not just existing customers such as the African units of brewer SABMiller Plc and food company Nestle SA. (NESN)

Half of the region’s population is younger than 20 years old, and there’s an emerging middle class. That gives Middle Africa “terrific demographics,” he says. With assets of $10 billion — more than twice the size of Togo’s GDP — the bank has more than 3 million customers.

Mechanical Engineering

Ekpe, who’s tall and slim and who wears a dark-blue suit, glasses and a mustache during a meeting in Lome, was born in a part of the Cameroons that later voted not to join Nigeria. He received a first-class honors degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Manchester in the U.K. and a Master of Business Administration from Manchester Business School.

After running Citibank’s corporate and structured trade finance unit for sub-Saharan Africa, he joined Ecobank as CEO in 1996. He left to work for United Bank for Africa and private- equity firm Africa Capital Alliance before being lured back to Ecobank in 2005.

Ecobank is visible across Middle Africa, with its signage often dominating the hazy skyline in Lome or welcoming airport arrivals in Benin. The only country in Africa that Ekpe hasn’t visited is piracy-stricken Somalia.

No Market Fear

“It helps with a lack of fear of these markets,” Ekpe says over lunch at L’Hibiscus in Lome, where he wields tongs and a fork to consume a plate of escargots. “Africa doesn’t scare me the way it scares most people.”

Even so, Ecobank has faced some harrowing moments. The bank’s profit dropped 46 percent in 2009 after 10 Nigerian banks failed an audit by that country’s central bank and required government support, causing a drop in asset values and a stock market slump. It proved to be a short-lived crisis for Ecobank: Full-year profit in 2010 more than doubled to $112.7 million as net interest income rose and bad loans dropped.

Ekpe says Ecobank’s rapid expansion — it added 136 branches in 2009 — is partly to blame for the mediocre results that year. “Profit margins are low because of the cost of growth,” he says. “Banking is a marathon, not a sprint.”

Consistent financial success has been elusive for other banks in Africa, too. Barclays Plc (BARC) failed to expand on the continent after it said in 2005 that its purchase of a controlling stake in South Africa’s Absa Group Ltd. would allow it to become “the pre-eminent bank of the African continent.”

‘Terrific Opportunity’

Since then, Absa has sold units in Namibia and Angola and now operates in only two countries outside of South Africa: Mozambique and Tanzania. Barclays is undeterred: In February, CEO Robert Diamond said that Africa “presents a terrific opportunity.”

The financial results are apparent at Standard Chartered, the U.K. bank with 148 years of history in Africa and assets worth almost $16 billion in 14 countries. Operating profit in Africa rose almost 10 percent to $103 million in 2010.

Part of the long-term challenge is hunting down customers on a continent where as many as 260 million people, or 80 percent of the adult population, have no bank account, according to McKinsey research.

Investec, a South African private bank and wealth manager, sees opportunity. Banks in Nigeria have granted loans of an average of $350 per person, in a country with a population of 150 million, says Chris Derksen, head of frontier markets at Cape Town-based Investec Asset Management, which says it is the biggest fund investor in Africa.

Loan Potential

In South Africa, the average amount is $5,000, while in Brazil, it’s $1,500, he says. “It gives you an idea of the low penetration of banking in a very big market like Nigeria,” Derksen says.

Ecobank is trying to increase its reach by getting business customers to become personal-banking clients. “We aim to have the managing director of each company as a private customer as well as the financial director and the deputy managing director,” says Nanan Ayoko Eugenie Adjahoto, head of Ecobank Togo. “We map them. It’s like a tree. We call them and ask them to talk to us. We can see people are earning more.”

Because many Africans lack a credit record and don’t earn enough to qualify for loans, Ecobank arranges facilities for private companies to extend loans to their workers, while encouraging governments to set up credit bureaus and judicial systems equipped to deal swiftly with defaulting customers.

Nicoue Raoul Amoyi, manager of the Ecobank branch in Lome’s Tokoin neighborhood, says he increased the number of his customers by 18 percent in 2010 to 6,500 individual and commercial clients.

Evening Approval

Ecobank’s attention to business owners helped win over Roger Bassowou, managing director of electrical equipment supplier Tiex & Co., based in Lome.

Bassowou, 44, sits in a large office with black leather sofas and a television that’s constantly switched on, in a squat building next door to a noisy bar. He’s surrounded by bits and pieces of electrical equipment for power stations. After struggling to get financing, Bassowou turned to Ecobank in 2004.

“I once needed an urgent loan of 95 million Central African francs,” he recalls. “Ecobank called me at 9 p.m. and said it was approved. I was able to sleep that night.”