Most sad to say, Tanzania has lost to the Grim Reaper one of its most illustrious pillars in entrepreneurship and the private sector in general, Ali Mufuruki, who died yesterday in Johannesburg. The holder of a BSc degree (1986) in mechanical design engineering from Reutlingen University in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, Mufuruki was a prosperous businessman, founder and board member-cum-chairman-cum-trustee of several flourishing entities in and outside Tanzania. Mufuruki was the founder, chief executive officer and chairman of the Infotech Investment Group family business; the founding chairman of CEO Roundtable of Tanzania (CEOrt), Africa Leadership Initiative (ALI East Africa), and Nairobi-based Msingi East Africa Ltd. He also served as board chairman of Vodacom Tanzania; Wananchi Group Holdings; a trustee of the Mandela Institute for Development Studies (MINDS-SA); TradeMark Africa (Nairobi); Chai Bora Ltd; a trustee of Trustee ATMS Foundation and AMSCO (The Netherlands) and Legacy Capital Partners Ltd. Mufuruki also served at one time or another as council member-cum-chairman of the Grants Committee of the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences; chairman of the Tanzania Public Safety Trust Fund; Partner of East Africa Capital Partners (Kenya); Member of the Tanzania National Business Council, and of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Advisory Group on sub-Saharan Africa (AGSA). In early 2016, Mufuruki was appointed co-chairman of the UK Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the impact of UK Aid for Africa Free Trade Initiative (AFTI). Also, he co-authored a 2017 book with Rahim Mawji, Gilman Kasiga and Moremi Marwa titled Tanzania’s Industrialisation Journey, 2016-2056:...

Africa’s future growth depends on policies that allow free movement and enable young people to look for opportunities beyond national borders. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) secretary-general Mukhisa Kituyi said at the ongoing Kusi Ideas Festival at Intare Arena in Kigali that the continent currently has a generation of young people who were more interested in collaborations than competition. Dr Kituyi spoke on the panel discussion themed, ‘Borderless Africa and why it is a winner’, that also featured Linus Gitahi, a board member of Msingi East Africa, and Rwanda Development Board chief executive Clare Akamanzi. “These young people look for opportunities beyond national frontiers. They overlook analogue boundaries and all the physical boundaries as they chase their dreams. This is the future and governments now need to create policies for them to ease travel, access and movement across the continent,” Dr Kituyi said. The panellists challenged Africa’s leaders to open up their borders to migrants and allow them to thrive within the continent as opposed to being self-centred and closed up, putting restrictive travel and migration policies. “We need to understand that almost 53 percent of migrant movements is intra-African and for Africa, we should take advantage of this. “Migrants are good both for the country they move to in terms of new and fresh human resource and also the countries they come from, through remittances. We need to encourage that,” Dr Kituyi said. “The millennials want to trade the way they go about their activities in...

The movement of workers from lower to higher productivity employment is essential for growth in low income countries. However, even with this movement economic structures have changed very little and this has been a concern for economists and policy analysts. Historically, manufacturing drove economic transformation in many developed nations but today new technologies have spawned a growing number of services and agro-industries including agriculture. They are tradable, have high value added per worker and can absorb large number of moderately skilled workers. Like manufacturing they benefit from technological change, productivity growth. One of the changes emerging in Africa is Manufacturing led transformation of East Asia, ICT-based services, and tourism and transport are outpacing the growth of manufacturing in many African countries. Between 1998-2015, services exports grew more than six times faster than merchandise exports. Kenya, Rwanda, Senegal and South Africa have vibrant ICT based services. Tourism is Rwanda’s largest single export activity accounting for about 30 percent of total exports, in 2014, 9.5 million tourists visited South Africa contributing three percent to its GDP. Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya and Senegal all actively participate in global horticulture value addition chain. Ethiopia has achieved extraordinary success in flowers exports, so much so that the country is now a global player in the sector. Kenya has achieved extraordinary success in Tea exports and the country is a global player in the sector. It's possible to develop a strategy for structural transformation based on three factors that have largely shaped the global distribution of manufacturing,...

The European Union and COMESA have signed 8.8 million Euros Contribution Agreement to increase private sector participation in sustainable regional and global value chains through improved investment/business climate and enhanced competitiveness in the COMESA region. The funds will be used to implement the Regional Enterprise Competitiveness and Access to Markets Program (RECAMP), focusing on agro-processing, horticulture and leather products. RECAMP will also support pre-selected value chains based on the potential to generate value addition, job creation and attraction of investments to the region. The EU Ambassador to Zambia and Permanent Representative to COMESA, HE Jacek Jankowski and Secretary-General to COMESA Chileshe Kapwepwe signed the Agreement. RECAMP will address critical issues, such as the provision of business information, facilitating market linkages, harmonizing regional industrial policies and creating a conducive business environment to attract investments. It will strive to ensure collaboration with activities of national trade support institutions and business development and service organizations in the Member States as they provide services to value chains as part of their mandate. These include product development; facilitate technology transfer, provision of business intelligence and connection to buyers. The program will identify champions or lead firms within the selected value chains that have both backward and forward linkages with SMEs and other intermediary firms in order to enhance effect coordination reduce coordination failures and improve competitiveness. In her remarks, Ms Kapwepwe said the program will make efforts to enhance the capacities and skills of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises to make them capable players in...

The construction of a new dry port in Wereta, in northern Gonder of Amhara Regional State, Ethiopia has been completed at a cost of US $3m. Expected to facilitate Ethiopia’s trade with Sudan, the cost of construction was covered by the Ethiopian Shipping & Logistics Enterprise, the state-owned shipping giant. The port The port which will be the eighth one in the country, will rest on three hectares piece of land and will be able to accommodate 1,000 containers at once. The regional government has set aside 17 hectares of additional land for the port to use as demand increases. Currently, the contractor is in the process of hiring and structuring human resources for use at the port. The facilities include a warehouse, a terminal, offices and a cafeteria. The other 7 dry ports in the country include: there are seven dry ports in the country: Modjo, Qality, Gelan, Semera, Dire Dawa, Kombolcha and Meqelle. They have an aggregate capacity of hosting 24,000 containers at a time and handle over 90% of the country’s exports, which stand at around US $3bn worth of goods, and imports, which is almost five times that amount The main one is Modjo Dry Port, which is located in the eastern inlet of Addis Abeba. Established a decade ago, it hosts 78% of the country’s shipping and logistics services. Facilitate trade Asheber Nota, communications director at the Enterprise said that the port will greatly facilitate trade with Sudan. Ethiopia’s exports to Sudan, mainly coffee, tea, meat...

On July 7, 2019 African Heads of State and Government held their summit in Niger and signed up the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). The signing was a continuation of a long process. It includes the summit where 44 Heads of States and Governments met in Rwanda in March 2018 to deliberate on the matter. The free trade area is among the key issues of discussion in the continent and beyond. New as it is, there are many unknowns in this potentially very important initiative to boost trade in Africa. This piece contributes in making the AfCFTA more known. AfCFTA The AfCFTA is a free trade area outlined in the African Continental Free Trade Agreement among 54 of the 55 African Union nations. Source: The Citizen

Parliamentary Diplomacy has played a key role in Global Governance. Experts from all over the world have analysed empirical case studies to demonstrates that parliamentarians and parliamentary assemblies have an increasingly important international role. The European Parliament, said to be one of the strongest autonomous institutional actors in world politics has been at the center of Parliamentary Diplomacy but the world has been turning attention to Africa: looking into the role of parliament and cabinet in foreign policy making, especially in South Africa and the East African Legislative Assembly. According to Weiglas and de Boer (2007, pp.93-4), Parliamentary Diplomacy is the full range of international activities undertaken by parliamentarians in order to increase mutual understanding between countries, to assist each other in improving the control of governments and the representation of a people and to increase the democratic legitimacy of inter-governmental institutions. In this article, Joel Okwemba, the Managing Director at the Centre for International and Security Affairs, shares his thoughts on Why we need a Structured Parliamentary Diplomacy for Africa. Why we need a Structured Parliamentary Diplomacy for Africa. However, opportunities are abounding when it comes to: how Parliaments interact with Foreign Policy questions; how Parliaments engage with the State on these questions; how to create form and structure on Parliamentary Diplomacy; and in the development of academic and theoretical literature on the Parliamentary Diplomacy theory in Africa. Parliamentary Diplomacy also referred to as Parlomacy[1], creates opportunities that are alternatives and complimentary to traditional diplomatic approaches that rely on...

The African Infrastructure Guarantee Mechanism’ was organised as part of the 3rd African Pension Funds and Alternatives Investment Conference. It was well attended by an audience mostly composed of industry players – private pension fund administrators, trustees, asset managers, government pension funds and development finance institutions. This grouping clearly demonstrates the interest to develop such initiatives to scale up greater investments in the African infrastructure space. The session was moderated by Dr Morgan Pillay Senior Infrastructure Finance Expert from GIZ, who presented the objectives of the AUDA-NEPAD session. To objectives were; to gauge the appetite of institutional investors (pension funds) for the implementation of the African Infrastructure Guarantee Mechanism and discuss its financial potential; and to make use of the Pension Fund conference platform to consult on what can make the concept a reality. This includes possible implementation strategies and concrete action steps towards scaling risk mitigation and an African Guarantee Scheme to enable the mobilisation of African pension fund investment for African infrastructure. The session panel, with representatives from the AUDA-NEPAD, the African Development Bank; the Development Bank of Southern Africa and the Trade and Development Bank gave its interpretation of the African Infrastructure Guarantee Mechanism as instrument of risk mitigation. Industry players were requested to give their thoughts on how the development of such initiative could bring value in facilitating alternative investments in the African Infrastructure space. Deliberations included working with development partners in the development of similar initiatives such as the African Development Bank and its co-guarantee...

The African Continental Free Trade Area is a continental agreement which came into force in May 2019. It covers trade in goods and services, investment, intellectual property rights and competition policy. Of the 55 African Union member states, only Eritrea has yet to sign it. The immediate objective of the free trade area is principally to boost trade within Africa by eliminating up to 90% of the tariffs on goods and reducing non-tariff barriers to trade. In 2017, the exports and imports between African countries represented only 16.6% of Africa’s total exports. This figure is low compared with exports within other regions: 68.1% in Europe, 59.4% in Asia, and 55.0% in America. Proponents of the free trade area say that increasing intra-Africa trade will provide larger markets for African producers and encourage manufacturing. It will also help achieve a better connection between production and consumption. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development argues that the phase of transition to the free trade area alone could boost intra-African trade by 33% and increase manufacturing in Africa. This line of argument is that free trade leads to industrialisation and structural change. But in my view it works the other way round: industrialisation leads to free trade. Industrialisation should come first Low intra-Africa trade is indeed an indication that African countries do not consume what they produce. But this is a problem of production (product focus), not trade. The export products of most African countries, which follow the colonial pattern, influence the...

Ethiopia vowed on Monday to remove barriers to investment in its mining sector, focusing efforts on minerals used in agriculture and construction which will help drive its industrialisation. Ethiopia, which has a mostly artisanal mining industry, wants to woo foreign mining companies to kick-start development of its vast mineral resources, a key part of its efforts to plug a large trade deficit and generate foreign exchange. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is shaking up several sectors in a liberalisation drive aimed at transforming Ethiopia into a middle-income country. “Our ministry will keep reforming to remove uncertainties that held back the development of the mining industry,” minerals minister Samuel Urkato said in a keynote speech to a mining conference in Addis Ababa on Monday. The government will give incentives to investors who develop minerals used in agriculture such as potash, a key ingredient in fertilizer, as well as construction minerals, a draft policy document seen by Reuters ahead of the speech showed. The ministry is still working out the details on tax and incentive policies, Samuel told Reuters, and the revised mining law would be announced by August next year. IDEAL NEW MINING DESTINATION? Ethiopia set out its stall as “Africa’s ideal new mining destination” at the conference in the Sheraton Hotel. Changes to its mining policies have been expected since February this year. Ethiopia aims to increase the mining sector’s contribution to GDP to 10% by 2030 from the current 3%. The government cut the corporate income tax rate for miners...