Our selection process will be rigorous and fair, with a view to ensuring that the most deserving nominees win the awards they are in the running for. It will involve the following procedure and stages:

1) Nominations will be invited from the public. However in the unlikely event that nominations from any of the four delineated sub-regions fail to include an enterprise that is clearly a market leader we reserve the right to add such an enterprise to the initial nomination list based on the recommendations of the contracted research team for that sub-region.

2) Our contracted research teams for each sub-region will verify the contents of each nomination and conduct due diligence on the nominees themselves. Nominations that fail to meet our awards criteria will be eliminated and nominations are found to contain false information in order to meet our awards criteria will be disqualified. The remaining nominations, ranked, by sector, in order of compliance to our eligibility criteria, as assessed by our research teams, will then be forwarded to our awards selection jury.

3) Our awards selection jury, comprising at least one member who specializes in each sub region and at least two members who possess pan-African knowledge and expertise across all four sub regions, will then meet to deliberate on the various shortlists for each sub-region. The jury reserves the right to eliminate any number of nominees rated at the bottom of the shortlists rankings, in order to ensure that its work is completed on schedule, as long as there are at least four nominees left to be considered in-depth for each sector in any of the four sub-regions.

The awards jury will make the final decisions on the winners for each category.

4) Apart from the consequent 48 awards in total which will be arrived at using the aforementioned methodology, the organizers, in consultation with the awards selection jury and representatives of any other formal and highly reputed sub-regional/regional business or professional associations, will identify 10 recipients of special achievement awards. Each award will be given based on clear criteria which will be made public. These awards will not necessarily be conferred based on spatial equality as the sector-based awards are, but sub-regional inclusiveness will be a major consideration in the final selection process. Should our selection process fail to produce winners across all four sub-regions in the 12 delineated categories, the organizers will increase the number of special awards to make up for the shortfall in quantitative terms.