18 percent too low as share of investment in Africa's GDP

Abstract

African nations must diversify and increase the sources of their growth on both the supply and demand sides of the economy for such growth to be both sustainable and transformative to the continent’s people, harped an ECA official today as he presented UNCTAD's Economic Development in Africa Report for 2014, to journalists in Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé. According to Mr Joseph Baricako, ECA’s Economic Affairs officer who passed off the key messages of the report to the media and development stakeholders, the document clearly states that to effectively reduce poverty, Africa needs to aim for at least a 7 per cent annual growth in the middle and long term. To achieve this goal, the UNCTAD document released on the theme “ Catalyzing Investment for Transformative Growth in Africa” states that it will not suffice to increase the volume of investment in Africa, but to increase productivity or the quality of investment and ensuring that it goes to strategic and priority sectors of an economy. The report says, growth in Africa during the last decades has mostly happened through consumption, without any real impact on job creation, and the reduction in levels of poverty and inequality.