Economic Recovery in Africa
Why Technology Needs to Be Harnessed for Africa to Recover from the Pandemic
Sourced from Redbubble and iStock. Despite the economic devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic on African economies, there is no doubt that the continent has the potential to recover given the fact that with a large youth population it promises to be a major consumption market in the years ahead with significant capacity for growth. However, it urgently needs to achieve faster economic growth in order to create jobs, grow its export revenue and become more globally competitive. The African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), which came into effect earlier this year after being delayed in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, aims to promote trade on the continent by creating the largest free trade area globally. This agreement plans to remove some of the main obstacles to ...
How to Forge an Inclusive Economic Recovery in Africa
Sourced from Redbubble and iStock. The spread of COVID-19 in many African countries has been more contained than some had expected in 2020. Experts have predicted that the economic fallout of the pandemic for Africans, however, will be different and direr than for the rest of the world. The reason is that Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for more than half of the world’s populations living at or below the poverty line. A recent World Bank scenario estimates that COVID-19 could push up to 40 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa into extreme poverty, seriously eroding the progress that African countries have made to reduce deprivation during the past two decades. Africa’s economic recovery from the COVID-19 crisis depends on how effectively governments will be able to balance urgent actions to st...
