In order for Africa to overcome poverty and underdevelopment, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, President of the African Development Bank, has urged African countries to stop exporting raw materials.
Africa produces less than 2% of the world’s manufacturing, according to figures from the US Trade Representative’s office and other multilateral organizations.
In a message made on Thursday on his official X Twitter, Adesina underlined the need for Africa to shift from being a supplier of unprocessed commodities to a producer of value-added goods.
“Africa needs to stop exporting its raw resources. The gateway to poverty is the export of basic materials. The path to prosperity is the export of goods with added value. And Africa has had enough of poverty,” he added.
Africa still accounts for less than 3% of global trade, while producing the most sought-after raw minerals in the world. In recent years, efforts to alter this narrative have accelerated. The goals of programs like the African Continental Free commerce Area are to promote value addition across industries, increase manufacturing, and improve intra-African commerce.
In order to restructure Africa’s economies, Adesina has continuously argued for policies that support agro-industrialization, energy growth, and better infrastructure.
Adesina criticized last week the unfair distribution of the Special Drawing Rights of the International Monetary Fund, pointing out that Africa only received $33 billion, or 4.5% of the $650 billion distributed worldwide.
The president of the AfDB emphasized that the SDR distribution model did not take into account the pressing financial needs of Africa, which had limited fiscal capacity to carry out a strong recovery plan and some of the worst economic scars from the pandemic.Adesina revealed that the African Union and the AfDB led initiatives to redirect unused SDRs from wealthier countries to African economies in order to rectify this imbalance. The IMF Board has now approved a new framework that was co-developed with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and makes use of the AfDB’s AAA credit rating.
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