Liberia ranked in the top 20 percent and ranked No. 35 out of the 183 economies surveyed for ease of starting a business, according to a report by the International Finance Corporation in 2012.

Mozambique and Rwanda have shown similar growth. These countries were among the poorest and most chaotic in Africa in the 1990s.

Ten years ago, I met an entrepreneur in Maputo who had won a lucrative contract from a Scandinavian aid agency to find and eliminate the anti-personnel mines which he himself had laid as a rebel commander in Mozambique’s civil war.

At first glance, it seemed the most cynical business plan imaginable. But I came away from the meeting with the sense that post-conflict zones place their own unique imperatives on the laws of supply and demand, and that contracts like this were defensible. The ex-colonel wept openly in the interview, as he described how rural villages – abandoned for fear of mines – had been repopulated within months of the clearances; a whole agrarian way of life restarted for people who had, in some cases, resorted to begging on the streets of Maputo and Xai Xai.

Michael Stock faced similar criticism as a director of a twin company, Bancroft Global Development, which is training Somali security forces to combat the terror threat posed by the Al Shabab terror group.

Stock’s investment is unique because he has a direct role in reducing the risk to his resort. He is paid by the African Union and the United Nations to train roughly one-third of the 17,000 Amisom peacekeepers in Somalia.

Although rejecting the “mercenary” label, Stock admitted to the Wall Street Journal that business processes unheard-of in the west were required to make real estate deals work on the frontlines.

The Journal wrote: “It took dozens of meetings with government officials, clan leaders and neighbors of the properties. You have to spend a lot of time figuring out who is who…There is no formal contract for the land, but rather consensus building…that results in a verbal go-ahead from the collective parties.”

Moman had no such risk control when he relaunched tourism in Rwanda in 1997. For him, the risks faced by the endangered gorillas made his own physical risk seem minor.

In an interview with Caravan magazine, he recalled that, at the time, war-weary villagers were used to only three groups of people who took initiatives: government officials, soldiers and priests. Going door to door seeking staff and community partners for his venture, he was assumed to be a priest.

A two-year search for a plot of land near the gorilla’s habitat was followed by multi-party negotiations of the kind Stock described, as well as wildly unrealistic sale prices demanded for tiny tracts of private land.

Patience and earned respect are the principle negotiating qualities in common between Stock and Moman. Rwanda was so ravaged from the genocide that even basic plumbing items like toilets and basins, had to be imported. Now Moman has four lodges in Rwanda and Uganda.

In a Q&A with Adventure Travel magazine, Moman described the challenge of staffing in a post-civil war environment: “It is a challenge – especially in Rwanda where the memories of genocide can be stronger and staff can have fears about working with people from different groups. We try and work in a way that is ethnic and gender neutral and work to build bridges between human beings of all backgrounds.”

He added, “It takes a long time to do things in post-conflict areas as infrastructure, people, education, training skills have been destroyed and you have to start at zero. But the human spirit is strong and people want to pick themselves up and progress.”