For Africa to prosper, Africans must be able to move | African Development Bank

By Ciku Kimeria

In 1960, Ethiopian runner Abebe Bikila made history in Rome as the first athlete from sub-Saharan Africa to win Olympic gold, even breaking the marathon world record. All this was made even more remarkable by the fact that he walked completely barefoot.

Akinwumi Adesina, the president of the African Development Bank (AfDB), told this story Quartz as an analogy for his unbridled optimism in the continent’s future.

It’s easy to be skeptical of Africa’s economic promise given everything that’s happened in the recent past: covid-19; the war in Ukraine and pressure on food and fuel costs; macroeconomic challenges that have led to the devaluation of several African currencies; and the disastrous consequences of the climate crisis.

But Adesina, who has been dubbed “Africa’s optimist-in-chief,” believes that, like Bikila, Africa’s future will defy everyone’s expectations.

“By 2050, 25% of the world’s population will be in Africa,” Adesina said in his opening speech at the recent Africa Investment Forum (AIF) in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. “Africa holds 65% of the world’s undeveloped farmland and is the world’s largest source of renewable energy…Africa’s future lies in investment, not aid.”

Backed by AfDB and in partnership with several major regional and global financiers, AIF, Africa’s largest investment marketplace, has mobilized more than $141 billion in investment interests since its inception in 2018, of which $31 billion came from the latest edition of AIF.

Adesina outlined major priorities for AfDB and its partners: ramping up Special Economic Zones for agro-industrialization; redefining the future of electric vehicles, given that Africa has the world’s largest cobalt deposits and significant reserves of lithium; and unlocking investment opportunities in renewable energy.

In an interview, Adesina spoke Quartz about an important ingredient in the future of the African economy: the mobility of people, as envisaged in the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the largest free trade zone in the world. The ease with which people can travel across Africa is much more than a matter of access to visas and travel documents; it is also one of flight costs, logistics and digitization.

timeline

2016: AfDB publishes its inaugural edition of the Africa Visa Openness Report, showing that it is easier for North Americans to travel in Africa than Africans.

2018: The African Union launches the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM), an initiative to open up African airspace. By mid-2021, 34 countries, accounting for 75% of Africa’s passenger traffic, have joined the SAATM, 10 of which are ready to fully implement it.

2019: The idea of ​​a single African passport begins to gain ground, but its implementation is hampered by several factors. By mid-2021, the Protocol on the Free Movement of Persons in Africa will have been signed by 33 countries but only ratified by four (Mali, Niger, Rwanda and São Tomé and Príncipe), well below the threshold of 15 countries needed to make the Protocol operational. to make.

2021: Trade under AfCFTA takes effect with the first batch of goods under the preferential agreement shipped from Ghana to South Africa in January. By mid-2021, the agreement has been ratified by 38 countries committing to cut trade tariffs on goods by 90% within five years for developed countries and within ten years for less developed countries.

September 2021: The Africa Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank), the continent’s trade finance institution, launches a payments platform to enable instant payments in African currency between merchants on the continent. Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, or PAPSS, is an incentive for AfCFTA.

The below interview with Adesina Akinwumi has been edited short and clear.

About trade and travel within Africa:

Trading does not happen in a vacuum. It is people who trade. Aside from the fact that you need connectivity, you also need to have the freedom for people to move from one place to another. I believe we cannot say that we have trade without borders if we put up barriers for people to travel. And I know that the countries are making a lot of progress. In the past, you could not travel in Africa with your national ID alone, but nowadays, in East Africa, if you come from any of the other countries in the region, you only need an ID card and you can travel all over the region.

This is good for travel, trade and investment. Other African countries are improving visa openness, an advocacy tool launched by the AfDB in 2016. Some of the countries that have done this and are doing impressively well include Rwanda and Benin. In fact Benin, [Seychelles and The Gambia] are probably the highest ranked countries in the index. Nigeria is starting to have a more open system. Ghana too. Much progress is being made, but some regions are lagging behind, notably North Africa.

However, the problems go beyond passports. There must be a lot of training for passport inspectors and also improvement of information at the border posts. Here we do a lot in the field of border posts in Africa, but also digitization … the need for digital information, so that in the future you no longer need to carry a passport.

On the importance of infrastructure:

But even all this is not enough. If you have a good passport but there are no roads to travel on, or the flights are too expensive and it’s cheaper to fly to London or Dubai than anywhere else on the continent, it’s no use. In addition to advocating for visa openness, the AfDB is doing even more here by investing massively in transportation infrastructure. Take for example this year at AIF, we were able to raise $15.6 billion to develop a six-lane highway corridor from Lagos to Abidjan. 75% of all trade in the ECOWAS region takes place there. This will carry everything and will be limitless in the sense that people can travel freely through that corridor.

It is built with supranational laws, which means that it transcends the laws of individual countries. In another case, we invested significantly in the Kazungula Bridge that connects Namibia, Botswana and Zambia. On that corridor, the waiting time for trucks crossing the border went from 14 days to an hour after AfDB’s investment. We also invested $1 billion in the construction of a highway between Addis Ababa and Nairobi to continue to Mombasa. That alone will allow an increase in trade between Kenya and Ethiopia by about 400%. These are the things that not only make it easier for people to travel, but also provide the infrastructure for travel.

About the logistics of flights in Africa:

When it comes to the open air, we still have some pretty big challenges. It is still very expensive to travel by plane. Some progress has been made, but not enough. SAATM is good, but if African airlines aren’t flying, why have we liberalized the industry? Much is needed to increase the number of African-owned airlines and improve their efficiency. The best we have in Africa is Ethiopian Airlines.

Much remains to be done to improve the management and safety of our airlines. These are areas where AfDB is investing heavily… especially airport modernization. For example, we helped with the expansion and modernization of the Kotoka airport in Accra. Blaise Diagne International Airport in Dakar was also done by AfDB. [And also] airports in Morocco, Togo and Guinea.

Mapping Africa’s visa openness

Openness of African visas by the numbers

2/3: The percentage of African countries that improved or maintained their African visa openness scores between 2016 and 2021

44%: African countries in 2021 offering an eVisa to Africans, up from 17% in 2016

$63: Average visa cost for Africans traveling on the continent

$12-$250: range of visa fees for Africans visiting other African countries, depending on length of stay

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72 hours: Average visa processing time for Africans traveling in Africa

1-10 days: Range of visa processing times for Africans traveling in Africa where data was available

On emerging technologies on the continent:

Innovation can only happen if you have the infrastructure and backbone to do so. AfDB invested in submarine cables to provide the fiber optic capacity for digital infrastructure in East Africa. We invested in submarine cables for the Central African region connecting the Central African Republic to Gabon, Congo and DRC.

We invested in terrestrial cables connecting Niger, Chad, all the way to Algeria and then Europe. That backbone has lowered the price of broadband, greatly facilitating the innovations we see today in fintech and some of the mentioned innovations in financial engineering, including crypto. If you want to do crypto, you need to have internet access.

Original story: https://qz.com/for-africa-to-prosper-africans-need-to-be-able-to-move-1849794529