• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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S. African, Ethiopian leaders fly Africa’s flag at Davos as Buhari absent

World-Economic-Forum

Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa will be carrying the African flag at the elite gathering of business and politics in Davos this week when focus will shift to the increasing fragmentation and nationalism threatening to unravel the gains of globalisation.

They will be joined by other leaders from the continent like the new President of Zimbabwe and his Rwandan and Botswana counterparts as well as 46 leading CEOs from Africa.

As was the case last year, the president of Nigeria, the continent’s most populous country and its biggest oil producer, Muhammadu Buhari will be conspicuously absent.

Of the 46 CEOs there will be only two women according to information from the World Economic Forum, organisers of the annual gathering.

Ethiopia has suddenly become an investor’s delight on the back of a rapid reform programme being pursued by the 42-year old prime minister who is bringing down age long barriers to investment in a market seen as rival to Nigeria because of the size of its population.

On the other hand, investor sentiment about South Africa has improved significantly after Jacob Zuma was replaced by Ramaphosa, a former labour leader with a pro-market disposition.
This year, the meetings in Davos that lies on the Swiss alps, will focus on such issues as how to draw a new and more effective architecture for global collaboration as a vital anchor for progress in the world.

“People around the world are getting increasingly impatient about failures of globalisation because they feel global trade is not working for them. So we will need to bring stakeholders together to discuss how to rebuild the platforms for how the world engages,” Elsie Kanza of the World Economic Forum told BusinessDay in an interview.

She explained, “the world has changed and is changing rapidly, we are seeing new processes, new technologies, new ways of doing things all of which are leading to disruption in ways unforeseen.”

The discussions will also focus on raising awareness about how the world is failing to deal with perceived global risks by getting leaders to pay the required attention to areas as water crisis as well as a new partnership for a new vision for averting food crisis in Africa, the DRC crisis and the work to cut ocean plastics blamed for mounting death of fishes.

In the past the forum has been credited with collaborating with the African Development Bank, the Africa Union and others in focussing attention on the continent’s massive infrastructure deficit and how to bridge it through creative private sector funding.

Teams from the forum have joined other critical stakeholders to work on interrogating projects around Africa, identify those that bankable so as to help in locating funding partners with a view to securing blended finance.