“The rise of Africa narrative is not a fluke, it’s a trend.” – Ngozi Okonjo Iweala
Recently, the Royal African Society (RAS) and the Government of Japan hosted an event in London themed: “Japan and Africa: A new kind of relationship?” where renowned practitioners in the field of international development discussed the future of Africa. This event is a pre-cursor to the 6th Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD VI), which will be held in Nairobi, Kenya from 27-28 August – the first ever TICAD summit to be held in Africa. The event highlighted the fact that Africa was moving from aid reliance to self- sustainability with support from Japan and other development partners.
This affirms Dr. Ngozi Okonjo Iweala’s talk at the recently concluded TEDSummit 2016, where she said “the rise of Africa narrative is not a fluke, it’s a trend.”
The gospel of the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative has been preached for so long, people are beginning to grow weary of it. Although significant strides have been made in certain sectors in the last few decades, in general, the progress made still falls below par.
A professor in the University of Tokyo and former President of Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), Professor Akihiko Tanaka, during a chat with Charles O. Boamah, CFO and Vice President of the African Development Bank, said that he believes African countries will become invaluable to Japan in the coming decades, as growing business partners with huge market potential.
He also said that Japan was willing to deepen its consultations so that they are able to find mutually beneficial approaches.
According to Professor Tanaka, in order for the continent to strengthen the trend of its development in the first decade of the 21st Century, it needs to improve efforts to deal with the decline in prices of primary products like oil; strengthen primary healthcare and tackle the forces of violent extremism which have spread to parts of Africa.”
However, Charles said that “the priorities must be: to light up and power Africa, tackling the energy deficit; to feed Africa, looking at the whole food chain and improving productivity in agriculture; to industrialize the continent, tackling its low contribution to industrial trade; to integrate Africa, improving intra-regional trade; and to improve the quality of lives of Africans, in terms of jobs and skills.”
