By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Business Forum is on track to be the biggest business event on the continent, which is co-hosted by the AfCFTA Secretariat and the Government of South Africa, is taking place from 16th to the 19th of April in Cape Town.
The event was rescheduled to provide an expanded programme of plenary sessions, roundtable discussions, fireside chats and side events, to cover key sectors and issues that are crucial to the success of the AfCFTA.
The side events, covering priority sectors such as agro-processing, automotive, pharmaceuticals, transportation and logistics, and digital trade and payments, will offer an opportunity to explore key trade and investment opportunities in these sectors.
The conference has been a mixed bag, to be frank says Nicolau Stavros, the senior executive for Strategic Trade Development at Aspen Pharmacare Group – a mixed bag in the sense that there have been a lot of panels and discussions around how we ought to be doing things, and that is the positive side of things.
But of course with all of these things we can talk about plans and instruments, but whether we have the capacity to execute on these things is always the question.
That is why I’m sort of erring on the side of saying it’s been a bit of a mixed bag, because the continental free trade area makes a lot of sense and is the right way for the continent to go because one does need to start aggregating one’s volumes and start getting economies of scale on the continent.
However, we need to turn political will into execution, and that is the part [on which] I think there has got to be greater focus and emphasis in the weeks and months ahead.
Africa is a highly fragmented and disaggregated continent when it comes to overall economy.
It becomes very difficult for individual countries on the continent to compete against much bigger geographies, whether China or India or the Americas – whatever the case might be.
But if you start aggregating 54 markets, a population of 1.3 billion people, GDP combined on the continent, that starts exceeding $3 trillion; then suddenly you start having economies of scale that you can start leveraging.
But leveraging those economies of scale also means that the continent needs to have pooled procurement mechanisms so that we start buying from each other, from African facilities for Africans.
Watch Live in the video below:
Video Courtesy of SABC.