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Africa Soft Power ends summit in Kigali, announces May as ‘Africa month’

By Guardian Nigeria
08 June 2022   |   3:55 am
The 2022 Africa Soft Power (ASP) Project has ended its ‘Africa Month’ summit.

Nkiru Balonwu,

The 2022 Africa Soft Power (ASP) Project has ended its ‘Africa Month’ summit.

The event hosted an all-star cast of industry leaders across the creative, cultural, knowledge and digital industries around the continent and diaspora in Kigali, capital of Rwanda, to three days of impactful conversations.

The theme was: ‘Africa and The Global Community: The New Face of Collaboration.’

The summit featured sessions on sports, music, fashion, financing/digital infrastructure, tourism/trade and payments, with discussants highlighting how to leverage Africa’s digital, creative and knowledge economies to benefit the continent and the global diaspora community.

Declaring the event open, Founder and Creative Director of the Africa Soft Power Project, Nkiru Balonwu, expressed excitement about the massive support received from discussants, partners and sponsors from within the continent and the diaspora.

With stakeholders at the event collectively throwing their weight behind the announcement, Balonwu disclosed that ASP will continue to promote May as ‘Africa month’, as part of a deliberate global campaign aimed at propelling Africa forward, leveraging the continent’s creative, knowledge, cultural and digital industries.

While delivering his keynote address, Secretary General of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Secretariat, Wamkele Mene, maintained that the recovery tool that Africa has at its disposal – post-COVID – is the AfCFTA.

“We expect that the recovery we want to see, whether in the service industry, trade in goods or digital trade, will be driven by trade on the African continent. We are committed to ensuring that we implement aggressively the AfCFTA, towards significantly reducing the barriers to trade and intra-African investment and ultimately, contributing to Africa’s overall GDP,” Mene said.

Speaking on the role of collaboration in advancing Africa’s payment ecosystem, especially for Nigeria’s creative, knowledge and technology industries, Jumoke Jagun-Dokunmu, Regional Director, Eastern Africa, International Finance Corporation (IFC), stressed the need for valuable collaboration between financial institutions and the creative, knowledge and digital industries.

She said: “Banks and financial institutions will only finance projects that they have full understanding of. If they don’t understand it, they will not finance it. It is important, therefore, that financial institutions make a deliberate effort to understand the different phases of creative and digital engagements, alongside the value that will be derived from such investments.”

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