Executive Summary
The Africa-France Business Conference & Awards is being organized and hosted by The Business Executive Communications Group. The entire event is designed in response to the growing trend of regionalism by the industrialized nations of the western hemisphere which have led to events such as the United States – Africa Summit and the United Kingdom – Africa Summit; and which have subsequently been replicated by eastern hemisphere countries such as Russia and China. The impending event aims at extending this trend to Africa and its largest single economic partnership bloc – the European Union. The event will comprise a half day conference which will be followed by an awards conferment gala evening event.
Our ground-breaking conference and awards aim to encourage, support and facilitate sharply increased trade and investment activities between member countries of the European Union (France) and participating countries from all around Africa on both bilateral and multilateral levels, the latter leveraging largely on the preferential trade and investment opportunities that the African Continental Free Trade Agreement has created for counterparty countries in all the other continents of the world as well as the terms of trade engagement established by the EU (France) with various sub regional economic blocks in Africa such as ECOWAS. To do this, the event will host a conference to be participated in by individuals and representatives of enterprises/institutions identified as award winners because of the exemplary capacities, conduct, performance and impact with regards to trade and investment between Africa and the EU; and carefully selected stakeholders in the promotion, facilitation and regulation of trade, investment and wider economic relationships between the two.
The conference will be followed immediately in the evening with the awards conferment ceremony itself which will take the form of a five star gala event attracting the attendance of award winners and their guests/delegations, top tier bilateral and multilateral trade and investment promotion facilitation and regulation institutions, senior government functionaries, major direct and portfolio investors, entrepreneurs, corporate manager and captains of commerce engaged in trade and investment between Africa and the EU as well as the international media.
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Rationale for the Event
The EU has traditionally been the largest trade and investment partner of Africa taken on a continental basis, measured by both volumes and values. This is primarily the result of the historic ties between the two regions, with the United Kingdom, France and Portugal having colonized most of Africa in centuries past. In 2019, trade between Africa and the EU reached 280 billion euros. In 2020 the EU accounted for 33% of Africa’s exports and 31% of its imports from non-African countries.
But the changing structure of the global economy has opened new vistas of opportunity in part because of the liberalization of sovereign African economic jurisdictions, the emergence of new areas of economic opportunity and the changing terms of engagement between the two regions. China is rapidly catching up and is now Africa’s second largest trading partner, buying 17% of its exports and supplying 22% of its imports in that year.
