Browsing: African presidents

Ramaphosa added that Africa is now taking concrete steps to write its own economic success story and the Intra-African Trade Fair is part of that story.
With Africa opening up new fields of opportunity, Ramaphosa said that seeing more of ‘made in Africa labels’ is critical if the continent is to change the distorted trade relationship that exists between African countries and the rest of the world.
He emphasised that the situation where Africa keeps exporting raw materials while importing finished goods from those materials is no longer tenable. By promoting trade in Africa, he said, “we strengthen our own industrial base and produce goods for ourselves and for each other”.…

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) is calling for debt deal for developing nations in face of the Covid-19 coronavirus.

UNCTAD, in a report titled From the Great Lockdown to the Great Meltdown: Developing Country Debt in the Time of Covid-19, notes that the virus outbreak came at a time when developing economies have already been struggling with unsustainable debt burdens for many years.

Coronavirus: African leaders stuck with neglected, outdated healthcare systems

The report notes that if the challenges are huge in advanced economies, they are enormously more daunting in developing economies.

“While advanced country governments struggle to revamp administrative and regulatory frameworks and to break ideological taboos, developing countries cannot easily flatten the contagion curve by closing down their largely informal economies without facing the prospect of more people dying from starvation than from the Covid-19 illness. Moreover, even the most advanced high-income developing …