Rebecca Harding, CEO of Coriolis Technologies, discusses Sub-Saharan Africa’s trade performance, its projected growth and developments around intra-Africa trade. This reduction in trade with the rest of the world has made Africa increasingly reliant on internal trade. Given the difficulties that are inherent to multilateralism across the region, however, this serves only to illustrate the point that Africa’s trade and development is in the hands of agencies outside of the trade and trade finance community. Harding: Intra-regional trade in Africa is roughly one-tenth of the size of extra-regional trade, and recovered less quickly than extra-regional trade after both the financial crisis and the oil price collapse (Figure 4). Using similar patterns for trade as those in previous crises to project the likely momentum of global trade, it looks likely that intra-African trade will be more affected than extra-regional trade and take longer to recover post-Covid-19.

Source: The North Africa Journal August 07, 2020 11:47 UTC