United Kingdom Holds Summit on African Trade
Boris Johnson invited 16 African leaders to an investment summit in London. (Flickr)
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson held a summit in London on January 20 with the hope of reinvigorating U.K.-Africa trade relations in a post-Brexit landscape, reports the Guardian. Johnson took the opportunity to announce the United Kingdom’s intent “to build a new future as a global, free-trading nation. That’s what we’ll be embarking on, on 31 January.”
The UK-Africa summit took place a mere two weeks before Brexit becomes official. Vox reports that the UK will lose EU voting rights on January 31 before entering an 11-month transition period to negotiate the specifics of Britain’s departure.
An article published by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) states, “We want the UK to be the partner of choice for Africa and the investor with the biggest impact in terms of quality jobs, growth and sustainability.” In particular, the article praised Rwanda and expressed hope for closer commercial ties in the near future.
The U.K. must contend with stiff competition to succeed in Africa as Russia, China, and other European powers contend for trade deals with the rapidly industrializing continent. A report in the Financial Times stated that despite British rhetoric, “in Rwanda, Ivory Coast, [and] Ghana, three African countries with economic growth [at] around 7 percent in 2019 at least one EU country features in their top 10 sources of imports while the U.K. does not even make it into the top 25.” Furthermore, the article includes data that “In 2018, peer EU economies such as France and Germany exported to Africa more than double the value of goods that Britain did.”
In another Financial Times report, however, an unnamed senior British official acknowledged that, though the country is a latecomer to Africa, it’s “better late than never.” With this in mind, the U.K. has decided to focus on sustainable infrastructure initiatives. Quartz Africa notes that in doing so, the UK will work with the African Development Bank to allocate £350 million ($458 million) to achieving these ambitious investments.
Development aid has grown to dominate Britain’s role in Africa. The Economist, reporting on Britain’s Department for International Development with respect to the FCO (comparable to USAID and the State Department respectively), writes that “the [FCO’s] core budget, now £1.1 billion ($1.4billion) a year, has greatly decreased over the past decade while the DFID’s has steadily grown. This is the case because, under British law, DFID’s budget must be at least 0.7 percent of GDP. Accordingly, most of the £14.6 billion ($19.1 billion) of aid provided by Britain in 2018 came from the DFID.
African countries can expect the newly intensified attention to continue as the UN predicts strong population and economic growth on the continent, as Africans are expected to make up a third of the global population by 2100. In the words of President Nana Akufo- Addo of Ghana as quoted by the New York Times, “The wealth of Africa is undisputed.”