Fight Against Extreme Poverty: Africa Needs To Work Together With Global Partners

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Fight Against Extreme Poverty: Africa Needs To Work Together With Global Partners

06 juin 2022 14:24

The World Economic Forum’s 2022 meeting in Davos, which took place in person for the first time since 2020, has come and gone with the global attention now turned on towards Russia and Ukraine with the hope for an end to the war. Appropriately, the theme for Davos 2022 was “Working Together, Restoring Trust”. We can only hope that the collective diplomatic skills of the organisation, honed over the decades, will encourage global political, social and business leaders to step back for a while from their own domestic concerns and take a clear and hard look at the state of the world today. Thus, global leaders who participated in the global meeting worked on thematic priorities like global corporation, economic rebalancing, society and equity, climate and nature, innovation and governance, industrial transformation, risk and resilience and global health. The biggest priority of the 2022 Davos come-together was to accelerate progress and the impact of the forum to tackle global challenges from Covid-19, climate change, education and global technology. These challenges which have further been compounded by the Russian-Ukraine crisis have severely affected Africa as rising food prices are signally a lurking food crisis in the continent. With Africa inextricably linked to events far beyond its shores, the theme of this year’s meeting –Working Together, Restoring Trust – could not be timelier. Nowhere has this economic storm been felt more than Africa. After the devastating economic effects of the pandemic, African growth recovered to 4.5 per cent in 2021. But an IMF report released in late April projects that growth in 2022 will slow to 3.8 per cent. The Fund’s economists offer a sombre outlook for growth on the continent: “The new crisis (the Russia-Ukraine War) comes on top of an already-protracted pandemic, and prospects for borrowing costs and global demand are increasingly uncertain, presenting policymakers with a challenging and complicated policy outlook – one with rising needs, greater risks, and fewer options.” Africa will need to work closely with global partners to navigate the food price shock and improve Covid-19 vaccination rates. As economic headwinds worsen, African countries will also have to enter into produc...