Africa’s next chapter needs factories

Implementation of strategies. But I do think there are a couple of things that make it a bit different and more imperative this time around. So, the first one I'd say, linked to climate change, is that we are already, as we know, according to the United Nations Environmental Programme, we have crossed the one and a half degree temperature rise. We have breached the target agreed at the Paris

Congress of the people. And not just is that meaning missing a target, it's meaning crossing borders, planetary boundaries, as the UNEP tells us. And it means that not only are we going to get more extreme weather events, but ocean circulations are going to be affected, permafrost is going to melt, and all of this is going to add to everything. And if we don't pull back from it, we're going to get worse and worse. Now, the important thing for Africa is that Africa and Southern Africa.

In particular, we are likely to be more than averagely affected. In fact, science tells us about twice as much affected. So the biggest challenge facing us is adaptation. How are we going to deal with the impact of extreme weather events on our economies and on our populations and our peoples? I think that if we look at this thing called adaptation and funding for adaptation, if we take the period even before the Trump administration,

Slashed all its commitments. The total global funding by 2022 for adaptation in Africa was about 13 billion US dollars, a cumulative total, versus an annual need estimated of about 50 billion. So any idea that we're going to have external funding to help us out of the challenges of extreme weather is, to paraphrase Mark Carney, a pleasant fiction. So we've got to grow our

Economies and we've got to transform our economies and yield much more income into our economies. And the only path to do that is to move to higher value addition. So, and then the, yeah, let me ask you: in that respect, Rob Davies: is the real obstacle then a lack of proper industrial policy, or that simply it comes down to the money that manufacturing elsewhere is just cheaper and more efficient? Well, I think that it is industrial policy, and of course, in

Industrial policy is going to have to focus on the other point and is going to have to address that. And what we do have is we do have in place an African Continental Free Trade Area, which is equivalent to a combined GDP equivalent to that of the eighth largest economy in the world. And that gives us an opportunity, and the advisory council I'm on is of the African Continental Free Trade Area. And I think it's working towards not just the trade dynamics.