Vice President Kashim Shettima has implored African leaders to work towards ramping up the $3.1 trillion Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of countries on the continent, representing roughly three per cent of the overall global total.
“The total Gross Domestic Product of African countries taken together is barely $3.1 trillion, which is less than three per cent of world GDP,” he stated.
Shettima, who gave the charge during the African Economy of Scale Plenary on the sidelines of the ongoing World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, regretted that the continent’s commercial activities still hover around three per cent of world trade.
He observed that “it is for this reason Africa is considered by top analysts the world over as a growth economy in dire need of investments and infrastructure.”
The Vice President told African leaders that economies of scale “portend the ability to do more” by coming together and form “a more formidable unit, with a bigger voice and stronger negotiating abilities.”
He urged them to run faster and purposefully to catch up with the rest of the world in eradicating crass poverty on the continent and prove that Africa could be a significant contributor to world’s productivity that can “integrate better with the rest of the world in an age when Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are redefining human interactions and existence.”
Shettima noted that while African trade agreement is projected to boost the continent’s GDP by $450 billion in the next one decade, the urgency to actualise a continental economy of scale “is the reason behind the continent’s trade cooperation, as demonstrated by the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA).”
He pointed out that the challenges dogging Africa are not drawbacks, but opportunities for engagement, productivity and profitability, even as he pegged the continent’s infrastructure deficit at trillions of dollar.
