Brookings Institution’s Foresight Africa Report
Last month, the acclaimed Brookings Institution released its Foresight Africa 2021 report, highlighting strategies and outlooks for Africa’s post-pandemic recovery.
Chapter 4 is entitled PRIVATE SECTOR LEADERSHIP: Building African businesses and creating jobs, but the report makes absolutely crystal clear that the road to economic rebound will be through public-private partnership, and that this sort of partnership is no longer a matter of convenience, but of necessity.
The chapter highlights a few notable successes so far: governments mobilising alcohol stocks into hand sanitiser and textile companies adapting to produce PPE; but in a major first for the African Union, it was a coalition of banking, telecoms, agribusiness, energy and transportation firms that came together to push for a pan-African public-private recovery fund that truly demonstrated the best in what is capable when governments and the private sector work in tandem.
Lerang Selolwane, Co-Founder and CEO of The Lucient Group, provides some commentary to the report, arguing that the private sector will need to be proactive in creating inter-industry partnerships. Africa needs to become self-sufficient and regionally interdependent by prioritising industries of basic necessity like food production, health care, education, energy, telecommunications, and transportation. These are the backbone on which ‘advanced’ industries–technology–will grow. Governments will need to be crafty to incentivise private sector partnership and network growth if Africa is to capitalise on this method of recovery.
This sort of intra-continental harmonisation will be critical to the success of the new African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), boosting Africa’s export capacity, and thus its global competitiveness.
Essentially, the report makes clear that the time to push for corporate responsibility is now, but governments must play an active role in incentivising this responsibility in a way that prioritises society over profits.
An example of the success of pandemic public-private partnership was just announced in the United States, where the US federal government ushered in the partnership of Johnson & Johnson and Merck–normally two avid pharmaceutical competitors–to bring vaccine administration an entire two months ahead of schedule.
With the robust sense of community that spared it the brunt of the public health disaster, the African continent has the capacity to get this right in a way perhaps no other region does. If governments and enterprise work side by side, we are about to see a phenomenal economic rebound.
If you know of a report that you’d like us to review, send us an email at support@australiaafrica.com