African Truths at a Business Conference
I attended the first Global Africa Business Initiative (GABI) in New York recently. It was well produced and well attended, and I got a lot out of being there. In addition to the many government and international institution dignitaries, successful businesspeople and civil society leaders speaking, there were numerous people in the audience well worth knowing. It was unfortunate that all the networking sometimes drowned out the speakers, but connections were made that should lead to enduring collaborations. For myself, there were several themes I found compelling.
Zain
Verjee, Executive Producer of GABI, started it off by quoting the late Bishop
Desmond Tutu, who once said: “We need to stop just pulling Africans out of the
river and turn to seeing why they’ve fallen in in the first place.”
The
New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) was established in 2001 with a
mission to “work with African
countries, both individually and collectively towards sustainable growth and
development.” It was designed to address six main sectors: agriculture
and food security; climate change and natural resource management; regional integration
and infrastructure; human development; economic and corporate governance, and
lastly, cross-cutting issues, revolving around matters such as gender, ICT,
capacity development, and communications.
There have been successes in the collaboration fostered by
NEPAD. For example, NEPAD manages the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture
Development Program (CAADP), aimed at revolutionizing agricultural production,
food security and marketing of agricultural products across the continent and
beyond. Through CAADP, African agricultural departments and ministries have
been enabled to achieve increased investment and output in agriculture, such as
in Malawi, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo and Zambia, as well as in other countries.
At a time like now when global food prices are high and sources of foreign
supply are tenuous, CAADP’s facilitation of cooperation has never been more
necessary.
Strive Masiyiwa, Founder of Executive Chairman of Econet,
said that every country in Africa has its own opportunities and risks. As the
continent develops the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), there always
will be differentials in the ability for foreigners to access these
opportunities in some countries and the capacity of those governments to create
and maintain an attractive economic environment. Therefore, AfCFTA is not
demanding that all members fully comply immediately with its standards. The
differences in capacity have long posed an obstacle that the Regional Economic
Communities have faced. In each one, there are outliers – countries whose
economic abilities or resource base are greater than their fellow members. This
also has been the case for the European Union, where countries such as Greece
have underperformed while countries such as Germany have overperformed in
relation to the others.
Brad Smith, President of Microsoft, a company that surely
is interested in Africa’s natural resources, had a different take on resources.
“Africa has an important natural resource: young people, but too few are in the
workforce.” Each year, African
universities graduate young people who find themselves bereft of legitimate
business opportunities. Some manage to succeed despite the absence of a
welcoming environment for innovation. Anyone who has attended the annual
African Diaspora Network conferences in America’s Silicon Valley has seen or
met with Africans who have created innovative companies designed to meet not
only Africa’s needs but those that exist globally.
Unfortunately, too many of these young innovators feel
compelled to leave the continent to realize their plans. In a 2012 paper on the
impact of Africa’s brain drain, Bernard Mumpasi Lututala
of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, he
looked at research on African migrants from 1990 to 2000. “The proportion of
skilled emigrants in all African migrants increased during this period from 22
percent to 31 percent, therefore demonstrating the intensification of the
phenomenon,” he said.
The
flight of African migrants has not abated since the turn of the century, and in
fact has increased.
Mumpasi
cites the difficulty of finding reliable statistics in making calculations on
the impact of the brain drain. However, there is another obstacle to that which
I believe is overlooked. How can you tell whether that skilled African adult will
be able to achieve in his destination what he or she might have had they stayed
in their home country. There are plenty of accounts of skilled Africans in the
West working well below their education level. Moreover, how can we know for certain what young Africans
will achieve in their new homes or what second generation Africans have or will
achieve if they identify with their new nationality rather than their family’s
homeland? Is that African-born or African descendant woman scientist considered
an American or a Namibian? What ties to her traditional homeland does she claim?
Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation, said
something many donors fail to acknowledge: “A silver bullet won’t come from New
York or Silicon Valley but from the field.”
Other speakers at GABI echoed this sentiment.
Too bad this realization didn’t come to donors years ago, who spent
billions in foreign aid without adequately consulting recipients on what they
wanted or needed. In the Bible (Matthew 7:9), it asks “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will
give him a stone?” Well, this is in effect what donors have done, perhaps
unintentionally in some cases, by directing aid to what they thought Africans
needed as opposed to what Africans thought they needed. As a result, many of
these aid programs ended up like rain in the desert – a lot of sound and fury
at the outset but no measurable results later like water evaporating in the
sand.
Wamkele Mene, Secretary-General of the AfCFTA Secretariat, acknowledged
the difficulties his program is facing in creating a single market. He said
that while Africa offers a single market of 1.3 billion, there are still 42 currencies
and several legal systems. Colonial Africa, after all, was not designed for
Africans but for the colonial countries who gave no thought to connecting
neighbors by road or air if that neighbor spoke a different language and didn’t
advantage the colonizer.
Although the Euro was
envisioned in the 1960s, it was not formed virtually until 1999, and the first
notes and coins did not circulate until 2002. The European Union’s solution to
exchange rate fluctuation was centralized economic management. Even though the
Euro has been successful, the road to its adoption was fraught with sharp
disagreements. France and the United Kingdom, for example, were dead set
against the reunification of German, apparently fearing the economic powerhouse
that eventually did result. The United Kingdom continued to use the British
pound as its currency alongside the Euro and has now departed the EU. If it
took the EU decades to form a functional monetary union when they previously
did business with one another, how difficult will it be for African countries
whose intra-continental trade is so low?
Finally, Her Excellency
Mia Amor Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados, said publicly some truths about
environmental efforts pressed on developing countries that we say amongst
ourselves but rarely are expressed in a public setting. She said that climate
is a nuanced issue. In some countries, the use of charcoal for cooking, despite
its obvious pollution inside homes, is caused by a lack of fossil fuels and
electricity. Since many developing countries have oil and natural gas in
abundance, how realistic is it to expect them to abandon such energy sources
when technology has not reached a point that renewable sources such as wind,
solar, tidal and geothermal are ready to be widely deployed in urban,
peri-urban and rural settings? Yes, Africa experiences a lot of sun, but solar
energy cannot replace fossil fuels on the ambitious timetable being pursued by
those in developed countries.
Her Excellency also said
something exceedingly profound that begs to be acknowledged more widely:
developing countries were denied the ability to participate in the Industrial
Revolution while it was taking off, but now they are paying a price in terms of
climate change that hits these countries harder than they can cope with. This
is a cruel irony that cannot be ignored, especially since developing countries
attempting to industrialize must either be allowed a grace period to pollute
more than desired until technology can catch up with anti-pollution efforts or
a more rapid infusion of investment in technology must be deployed to allow for
low-carbon emission development along the way.
There were many more
ideas expressed in public presentations and networking engagements at GABI. We
should look forward to more frank discussions, but more so the results of
implementation of these ideas between now and the next GABI conference.
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