Angola: Angola’s has estimated population of 25.78 million

Tripartite Free Trade Area plods along slowly in Africa

2017/06/24 Trade between African nations has long been outstripped by intra-regional trade in other parts of the world – for Africa as a whole, intra-regional trade is between 10% and 13% of total trade. This is far lower than in regions such as the EU, where about 60% of trade is between member states, and the Association of South-east Asian Nations, which has a rate of about 25%. Intra-regional trade in North America is put at about 40%. However, the ratification of the Tripartite Free Trade Sector(TFTA) – potentially later in 2017 – could help change that and push the development of additional intra-regional trade increase. A pan-regional free-trade zone, the TFTA stretches from Cairo to Cape Town and encompasses 26 African nations. Africa’s Tripartite Free Trade Area would reduce regional tariffs and create a pan-African single market, to aid development and cash in on a growing middle class in the continent. But with member countries often belonging to multiple economic areas, progress is both complex and slow, as Kit Gillet reports.  

Global economic gravity rapidly pulling towards Africa

2017/06/20 The second International Conference on the Emergence of Africa (ICEA) was held in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, in March 2017. Since the initial conference in 2015 — at a time of robust economic increase on the continent — hopes for economic evolution have dimmed because of a crash in the price of commodities, volatile world financial markets and a slowdown in world increase. Before departing New York to attend the second ICEA conference, jointly organised by the World Bank, the African Development Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Assistant Secretary-General of the UN and chief of UNDP’s Regional Bureau for Africa Abdoulaye Mar Dieye sat down for an interview with Africa Renewal’s Kingsley Ighobor to talk about Africa’s economic development opportunities and challenges.

How to boost private sector investment in Africa’s electricity infrastructure

2017/06/15 A new World Bank statement has called for increased private sector investment in Africa’s under-developed electricity transmission infrastructure, a vital ingredient for reaching Africa’s energy goals. The statement which was made available to the Ghana News Agency on Thursday by the World Bank indicated that Africa lags behind the rest of the world at the same time as it comes to electricity, with just 35 % of the people with access to power and a generation capacity of only 100 GW. According to the statement those who do have power typically consume relatively little, face frequent outages and pay high prices.

Study of mathematics on the decline in Africa – Prof Allotey

2017/06/15 Despite the increasing importance of mathematics to economic and societal evolution, the study of the subject in Africa is declining, Professor Francis Kofi Ampenyin Allotey, African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Ghana (AIMS-Ghana) has said. He said several reasons had been attributed to the poor national of affairs in mathematics in Africa such as: “Inadequate student number, particularly females due to poor teaching of mathematics in primary, junior and senior high schools, lack of motivation and incentives and poor employment prospects in mathematics in a lot of sections of the economy other than teaching”.