Decry Africa’s low share of global trade
Former Presidents of Afreximbank, Messrs Christopher Edordu and Jean-Louis Ekra have stressed the need to integrate local companies into value chain of extraction to enable Africa achieve global competitiveness.
The duo spoke at a plenary session with the theme: “Thirty Years of Making a Difference: Reflections From Former Presidents at the bank’s 30th Aniversary Celebration and yearly general meeting held in Accra, Ghana yesterday.
Specifically, Edordu decried Africa’s share of global trade which has remained relatively low at less than five percent.
He pointed out that much needed to be done to unlock developmental opportunities that exist in the continent.
However, he said huge capital is needed to fund developmental projects that would stimulate growth in the continent.
“Total trade as share of global trade is still small, there is opportunity to do more but finance is very important. Individual are suffering. We need to do more to assist them,” he said
On strategies adopted to accelerate the growth of the bank, the Ex-president said the management adopted an adaptive and flexible leadership model in addition to a sustainable succession plan.
“Emphasis on teamwork, we also adopted leadership that focused more on innovations, knowledge and not based on charisma. We inculcated minimum standard and innovativeness into our operations.
“We have good succession plan, we created policies and lived upto it. As our organisation evolve, very many of our activities were outsourced due to the strategies we adopted that worked for us.”
In his own contributions, Ekra said there is need to design products that would accelerate growth of small businesses must to boost Africa’s industrialised.
“If you have big companies anywhere, you will see smaller companies. It is not mutually exclusive. Africa must be industrialise for survival reasons. SMEs are very essential, we need to design products and be more integrative.
“There are so many capitals not appropriately tapped, we can leverage on so many sources of capital. We need to be innovative to solve so many problems,” he said.”
