Africa must repeat its Covid-19 success to achieve more growth: Masiyiwa

The African continent has a responsibility to collaborate to find solutions to achieve higher levels of economic growth in the same way that the continent collaborated to fight Covid-19 and get Africans vaccinated.

This is according to the founder and executive chair of Econet Group, Strive Masiyiwa, who addressed the launch of South Africa’s Business 20 (B20) activities. The event co-ordinates the business segment of the G20, which South Africa is presiding over this year.

The telecommunications billionaire said the past decade was littered with examples of high-level collaboration between African governments and the private sector in response to crises including the Covid-19 global pandemic and the Ebola crisis that hit West Africa in 2014.

Addressing the B20 on Tuesday, Masiyiwa recounted the work he did in supporting Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma in getting doctors and nurses to respond to the Ebola outbreak and the support he gave President Cyril Ramaphosa in getting vaccines to Africa during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We cannot accelerate the growth and the development of this continent without this level of collaboration. We need to capture that spirit when we look at the abyss and say 'we are on our own'.

“Yes, we reach out to all the friends who will come and take the journey with us, but Africa now must collaborate. We must collaborate. We must stop with the talk shops. We can act. Our people are ready to act,” he said to a round of applause.

He recalled a phone call with Dlamini-Zuma during her time as AU chair where they agreed to raise up to $100m from the continent’s private sector for 1,000 doctors and nurses to lead a regional response to the Ebola crisis.

In 2020, he said, he provided fundraising support with Ramaphosa, which led to the establishment of the Africa Solidarity Trust. He said through collaborations with the Presidents Bureau this level of partnership also helped establish the Africa Centre for Disease Control in response to Ebola.

He said these partnerships helped secure $3bn for Covid-19 vaccines from Johnson & Johnson on short notice, with help from the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank).

Africa was the only continent that reached the 70% vaccination target and achieved the lowest per capita mortality rate, he said. He said thanks to these interventions, Africa delivered vaccines to the Caribbean after a shortage in that region.

This allowed the Jamaican 2022 Beijing Olympics team to get Covid-19 vaccines, which allowed them to compete under the vaccine mandates of that time.

Earlier in the day, the vice-president of economics and private sector development at the International Finance Corporation, Susan Lund, said Africa’s young population was a major advantage for the continent’s developmental goals, but underdevelopment meant the continent’s economies would struggle to provide jobs for future jobseekers.

She said by 2035, the working-age population of Africa will surpass that of India and China, with more than 750-million working-age people by 2050 and that the African economic region was projected to grow by up to 4.2% by 2026.

But she said this was a benefit only if people had quality jobs. At current rates, only 150-million jobs can be created for 300-million young Africans entering the workforce by 2035, she warned.

TimesLIVE