African success stories in regional trade and investment coupled with the increasing willingness of African leaders to look more within to tap the Continent’s collective resources, provides a solid foundation for accelerated intra-continental trade and investment, says the Director General of the Commonwealth Business Council (CBC), Dr. Mohan Kaul. “Already, we have 220 projects in eight African countries being discussed and CBC will support the effort at mobilising resources from within Africa to fund investments in those projects,” said Kaul, who is optimistic that these investments will engender new projects. Addressing the media on the sidelines of the 7th Africa Investment Forum in Accra, February 8th-10th, the CBC top-brass assured the Continent’s business community, who are wearied by numerous protocols aimed at enhancing intra-regional trade and investments that seem to be getting nowhere due to lack of political will to implement them. The CBC observed that there is a realisation among the international investment community that a change is occurring on the continent - that Africa’s people are becoming more enterprising. The CBC’s Chairman, Dr. Pascal Dozie, emphasised the need for Africa’s business community to think pan-African and first seek to pool resources to fund major projects on the continent, and subsequently look to the IFC for refinancing of such projects. Dozie said regional economic blocs should take the lead by fostering cross-border projects, “and as individual blocs integrate their national economies appreciably, further integration between different regional blocs can then be pursued to engender continent-wide integration. “There are already solid examples that can easily be replicated in other parts of the continent; the establishment of a single border post between Zambia and Zimbabwe has enhanced trade by reducing delays along their trade corridor from 14 days to barely two hours. Recent studies in West Africa by USAID’s Improved Road Transport Governance (ITRG) project shows that delays and bribe-taking by security officials along trade corridors greatly increases the cost of doing business within the ECOWAS market. A typical trip from Ghana’s port of Tema to the Malian capital of Bamako may cost a trucker an average of US$65 on the Tema-Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) corridor of 1,057km and US$90 on the Ouagadougou-Bamako corridor, a distance of 820km. The Tema-Ouagadougou stretch has about 25 checkpoints delays average 244 minutes, while the Ouagadougou-Bamako portion has about the same number of checkpoints with delays of 185 minutes. “The success story of a regional transportation system, and the positive cooperation between COMESSA, SADEC and PAC in Eastern and Southern Africa, is worthy of emulation by the other regional groupings on the continent,” Dozie said. Other concerns of Africa’s business community regarding hindrances to improved intra-regional trade and investment include the list of prohibited import items to individual national markets. Nigeria, ECOWAS’ single largest market and sub-Saharan Africa’s second-largest with a population of about 150 million, has a prohibition list that effectively debars the entry of some 70 items on Ghana’s nontraditional export list, a country of 25 million people with an annual GDP about a tenth of Nigeria’s US$200billion annual GDP. Mr. Ishmael Yamson, Chairman of the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre (GIPC), says countries within the su-region need to ensure their business-people do not import from other parts of the world only to redistribute within the sub-region, which has a protocol of allowing goods with 30 percent local inputs to be freely traded among ECOWAS countries as a measure to eliminate the challenge of prohibited items. “Unilever Ghana exports products unhindered to the Nigerian market because of the certainty that its products are manufactured in Ghana,” Yamson said. GIPC’s CEO George Aboagye however stressed the need for African governments to cooperate in promoting increased trade and investment among them, by discussing their prohibition lists and expunging those items that pose no problem among their individual countries. Source: B&FT