 Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. My name is Adrian Monk from the World Economic Forum. My great pleasure to introduce this opening co-chairs press conference for the World Economic Forum on Africa 2016, which is taking place under the theme of connecting Africa's resources through digital transformation. Before I go on, introduce our co-chairs, a couple of housekeeping messages. This is my mobile phone. I'm going to turn it to silent. Please take yours out and do the same thing. Nothing's more embarrassing than answering a telephone call during a press conference. We'll have time for some questions and answers after hearing from each of our co-chairs. When we do, if you could tell us who you are and which organization you're with, that would be fantastic. This press conference is being live-streamed, so I'll be on my best behavior. Without further ado, I'd like to introduce our co-chairs for this meeting. Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, who's president of the African Development Bank. Dominic Barton, global managing director of McKinsey & Company. Grassa Michelle, founder of the Foundation for Community Development, Mozambique. Tariq Sultan Alessa, chief executive officer and vice chairman of the Board of Agility based in Kuwait. And Tony Elamelu, founder of the Tony Elamelu Foundation of Nigeria. We're going to hear from each of our co-chairs on their hopes and expectations for this World Economic Forum on Africa. And I'm going to begin by asking Dr. Adesina to share some of his hopes and expectations. Well, thanks very much. It's a great honor to be a co-chair for this World Economic Forum this year in Africa. I think the issue that we are talking about is the fourth industrial revolution. And that is very, very important for Africa to be able to participate in that. We must recognize that fourth industrial revolution is already on its way. Yet Africa has not yet participated in the second industrial revolution, which is just simply about providing access to electricity. Whether it's the first, second, third, fourth industrial revolution, everything revolves around having access to power. And that's why the African Development Bank has launched a major effort called the New Deal on Energy for Africa to light up and power Africa within 10 years. With that, we'll be able to improve the access of smaller, medium-sized enterprises to electricity. We'll be able to improve the industrial capacity that Africa has. We'll be able also to improve the competitiveness that Africa has in global markets. Because electricity is like blood in your body. You don't have it, you have life, you don't have it, you don't have life. That's the way it is. So we've taken that very seriously and that's one of my big issue here at this meeting is to communicate to our stakeholders, the private sector, the government leaders, the importance of lighting up and powering Africa. The second issue that we'll be talking about is the whole issue around jobs. If you take a look at Africa today, Africa is the youngest continent in the world. But we have a job crisis. And that job crisis puts about two-thirds of Africa's youth without jobs. Most of them are in vulnerable positions. And these, unless we deal with it, we'll actually heighten social, economic, and political fragility on the continent. And therefore, the African Development Bank will be announcing in different sessions at this meeting a new initiative called Jobs for Africa's Youth Initiative. And that initiative is focused on creating 25 million jobs for Africa's youth over the next 10 years. Most of that will be in terms of skills development and entrepreneurship development and financing to support the businesses of young people in Africa. My expectations is that at the end of this World Economic Forum session, we'll be able to properly understand the enabling conditions that Africa must fulfill to participate effectively in the fourth industrial revolution, but also how should we also work to unleash what I call a skills revolution for the 24th century jobs. Thank you. Thank you. Dominic. Thank you, Adrian. And I couldn't agree more with what President Adesina said about getting us into the fourth industrial revolution. We need power and electricity. I think there's terrific things that they have underway. I just wanted to say a couple of things. The overall point is that I'm very bullish on Africa. I think that there's a lot of media headlines that tend to emphasize the negative aspects, but there are many good things going on. This is the second fastest growing region in the world. And when you disaggregate it, look at the granularity, even with the commodity cycle being at a low point, you see breakouts, you see 13 countries that have actually increased their growth over the last five years. And if you look at the longer term trends, the youth point, this will be the youngest population on the world. We have to make sure that people are educated. I think vocational education will be critical. But you look at the urbanization that is also happening, which has been one of the biggest drivers of growth, productivity growth in Asia over the last 25 years, and technology, and granted that we need to have the electricity or blood in the system to deal with the technology, I believe, in the industrial revolution, 4.0, as Klaus Schwab talks about it, I think is gonna be a critical enabler. A couple of areas in particular on that that I wanna point out is e-commerce. The ability for small, medium-sized enterprises to be able to connect to a larger economy through e-commerce is actually quite a profound innovation in industry 4.0. It is actually one of the fastest growing areas in Africa right now, e-commerce. It is the single reason why we're seeing growth in the Chinese consumer over the last five years. It's Tencent, Alibaba connecting up people to be able to trade and move things forward. So we're bullish. There's lots of, I think, positive underlying forces here that need to be tapped and captured as we move ahead. But the area that we're gonna focus on in particular is the integration of the continent. As you know, Africa is the least integrated of the continents that are out there. And some of the efforts actually that Rwanda, I think it's wonderful that we're actually in Rwanda doing the WEF this time, I think is a great role model in terms of the visa, for example, initiative that the World Economic Forum and others have been involved in to encourage the free flow of people through it. One of the things we've noticed when we look at Africa is there are 700 companies that have over half a billion dollars in sales, which a lot of people would think it would be a lot smaller of a number. We actually think it should be a lot larger of a number and they need to be able to scale. And to scale you have to integrate. And our infrastructure, whether it be transportation or the power of course. But also people, we need to push that to be able to drive it forward. So I'm hoping in today's session we will talk about the ability to integrate more, to unleash more of the growth that's here. Thank you very much. Krasya. Thank you. I'd like to touch on two issues. One is education. I believe that for Africa to catch up with demands and requirements of developing 21st century, we as Africans, we have to reinvent our systems of education. We have not been able to give opportunities for children to learn and to be able to command knowledge and skills. We have not been able to make of education anticipating the needs of skills in 10, 15 years. And that's what a system of education should do. I don't see us really moving as we should if we don't take a deep look on how we reform, we reinvent our systems of education. And here, I'm not talking only of public sector. I think public sector has a role to play, has to engage with the public sector to say what are the skills which are required today will be required in 10 years time, in 20 years time, in 30 years time so that the systems will enable themselves to prepare young people for the future. I think we need also to engage much more scientists and researchers to bring the best practices in the world so that in this reinvention of the system, we bring the best which has been done in other parts of the world and quickly then we can catch up. This is one. The other thing I would like us to discuss during these meetings is the issue of gender equality. There has been some efforts and some success is visible in public sphere and even in education, the lower levels of education, it is coming. Children, girls, and even adolescents are being given opportunity to be into the system, for instance. But let's talk of private sector which is the dominant discussion of the World Economic Forum. How many companies are taking seriously to have in the boards and the excoms, women? And knowing that we are not talking of women as token, we mean to bring skill, the experience, to expertise which women do bring to the board. And it has been proven. I mean, the researcher has said, yes, when you have boards in numbers, you are going to perform better. It's good for your company. It's a business case. I'm not talking of a human rights case. I'm talking of business case. And I'd like to ask, I mean, big business who are here, how many of them have really taken gender equality seriously? The other sector of gender which I'd like to raise is in financial inclusion. And we, as the Gerson Michelle class, we brought here actually the possibility of discussing financial inclusion of women because we think it's an entry point for women to play a meaningful role in development of our economies which will bring, of course, prosperity for our nations, will bring prosperity for our continent. And we brought women who are in agribusiness. And I know the president of the ADB is very concerned about, and yes, women are food producers, but women are not at decision-making tingles when policies about agriculture are being made, where the resources are to come from, where they have the skills they are trained to move from the subsistence level to be really in the agribusiness. We also brought here women who are trying to work on how to move from this bone to the medium and from the medium to the big level of business so that we break that the dichotomy of women in informal sector and other people are in the formal sector. So these are the issues I would like us during these days to discuss and to see how we take seriously. In a way, we can report to ourselves to say, these are the, this is the progress we have made. Talk about the results as well. Not only giving messages, this has to be done. It's what we have done and what is the next stage. Thank you. They're great points. And in case any companies are listening and wondering where that female talent might be, they should have been last night's Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award where over half of the winners are women. And there's an incredible pool of talented female entrepreneurs working in the social space who would, I'm sure, be ideal candidates for some of those board positions you're talking about. Terry, can I bring you in, please? First of all, it's fantastic to be here in Rwanda. It's a shining example of what good governance can do. I think the emerging markets, Africa and the world need more examples like Rwanda to really help us in the next, to meet the challenges of this digital revolution. When the touch briefly on this concept of the digital revolution, I think there's two ways to think about it. The first is that the revolution gives us an opportunity to basically leapfrog maybe shortages of infrastructure or challenges that in the past have led a certain way of developing. So there are opportunities to actually to adopt new technologies and to leapfrog maybe mistakes other countries have made or regions have made to really take advantage of these technologies. But I think the real and more productive way to think about this is to ask ourselves a question, who is gonna be doing the digital revolution? It's gonna ultimately come down to SMEs. And what are the issues that are getting in the way of SMEs? And I believe it's the same issues that made it difficult for SMEs to actually develop and grow their share of the market in the emerging markets. We all know that nine out of every 10 new jobs in emerging markets coming from the SME segment. So what are the things that need to take place for SMEs to really be in a position to take advantage of this industrial, for industrial revolution? I think the first thing we need to focus on is trade facilitation. How to make Africa an easier place to do business. The segment of the economy that's most sensitive to bureaucracy and the difficulty of doing business is the SME segment. And that's really the medicine that we need to really unlock the potential of this digital revolution. So the first thing we have to do is make it easier for everybody to do business and to facilitate trade. And that's low hanging fruit. And I think there are a number of good initiatives ongoing but we need to go faster. I think one helpful area of focus is this idea of regional trade blocks. And I think to the extent that we can accelerate the harmonization and simplification of trade and related processes around these blocks, we can really increase the multiplier effect from simplification. And that's what we really need to focus on going forward. And finally, I think infrastructure. Our company is investing heavily in infrastructure for the supply chain where we're bringing together electricity, warehousing and distribution all under one location. And we believe that in doing so, we might... So I believe most of you who have seen Rwanda for the first time will see that it's a... That functions very well. I say that I'm here and very happy to be a part of this World Economic Forum holding in Rwanda because I see myself as an African capitalist at heart and everything that I do. And this whole discussion to me boils down to the issue of economic empowerment of our youth. I'm concerned as many of our participants here that we need to be careful in Africa and make sure that our demographic boom does not become demographic doom. And the way to do this is to make sure that we economically empower our youth. We have a lot of them, but if we don't do this, it can become a major cause and problem for us. And I'm happy that we're talking about job creation, youth education in a manner that is functional in the 21st century. Access to electricity, which will help us to achieve the economic empowerment of our people. I and the foundation that I founded we are trying to support entrepreneurship on the continent because we have seen that our people have great ideas, but the problem they have suffered is lack of access to capital, lack of role models or mentors, proper training. And so we are trying to do this. In 22 years ago, I endowed 100 million U.S. dollars to the Tenebelli Foundation to run an entrepreneurship program across the continent. The sector agnostic is open to people in fit for Afghan countries. The first batch was very successful. We had 1,000 people, 20,000 applications. We worked with Accenture. Accenture helped to screen the applicants. We selected 1,000 from every country, but one, I think only Libya in 2015. And these people, we gave them seat capital, $5,000 first. We trained them for 12 weeks. We put them, assembled them in boot camp, and they started. And as they proved their concept, we give them actually now $5,000. The second $5,000 is refundable, repayable. But the first one is not repayable because we believe that what entrepreneurs need is not grant. Entrepreneurs need access to capital and they need education. They need the kind of education I've been discussing. And it is amazing what we have seen working with these young Africans. Two days back, I was in Uganda to visit the cohort of the people who have in Uganda, 104 of them from Uganda. And it was amazing. One of them told us how he has been able to support through solar power, put access to electricity, to access to power in 500 homes, village homes. And the story is legendary for others also. So as I come to work in this capacity and we get like this opportunity, my expectation is that we should all work together. We have huge number of unemployed Africans. But they have great ideas. I like, okay, so the second batch, for instance, that just ended in 2016, 45,000 people applied from again all African countries. Unfortunately, we chose, we selected just a thousand because the $100 million program is $10 million every year, $10,000 per participant, so 1,000 participants every year. And in 10 years, it comes to $200 million. So we are constrained to stop at 1,000 every year. What do I expect us to do? The message, let other worthy Africans, let friends of Africa who want to help Africa truly, truly develop and become self-sufficient, self-reliant and let organizations in Africa that are truly committed to youth empowerment and job creation on the continent, we have 45,000, choose only one that, so we have 44 of fulfilled or met aspirations. Please don't come to us, we're working with a central, irrepeatable firm. Let us send you the list of others who are not selected. Choose the ones you can help on that list. Don't bother about educating them because we have an online training platform that will invest significantly on and we can train any number. But they need the seed capital to prove their concept. This is a message and I believe if we do this, it will help us to leapfrog and we truly can join the fourth industrial revolution, which is the digital transformation. Thank you very much. Let's spread the message. Thank you. We have a very brief slot for questions. Can I just get a sense in the room of who wishes to ask a question if you have a question you'd like to ask our co-chairs? Please raise our hand. We'll try and get to you with a microphone. Please make them questions, not statements. Please be brief and we'll try and get as many folks as we can. Gentleman on the front row and then we'll go the ladies behind. Thank you very much. My name is Klema Odingemana for Reuters. My name goes to Adsina, president of AFDB. I wanted to know what's your assessment of Africa's growth this year and maybe next year. And when you say you want to reduce joblessness in Africa, how are you going to do it? Thanks. Great. Ladies behind. Thank you. My name is Margie Mutesi from Randa TV and African News. Mine goes to Adsina as well. We are jumping the second, third revolution to the fourth, which in future is set to replace, machines are set to replace humans and we're talking about reducing unemployment. Aren't we seeing higher levels of unemployment if we embrace this revolution? Very good point. Lady next and we'll try and take these three. Thank you. My name is Victoria Roshidzo from Zimbabwe, the Herald. My question is directed at Grasa. You spoke, you lamented about the absence of women on boards and other top management. From your perspective, this is an issue that has been talked about for years. What is the hold up? Good point. Okay, I'm going to ask each of our panelists to just address that. We haven't got a huge amount of time and they've all got sessions to go to. But effectively just summing up those questions, the prospects for African growth, the impact of robotization on joblessness and on opportunities for job creation. And finally, we've heard a lot of talk about female empowerment. What are the practical measures that can be implemented to actually make that a reality? So, Dr. Azin, I'm going to start with you. Well, thanks. If you take a look at Africa's growth trajectory, right now Africa is growing about 4.2, 4.3 percent. The global growth rate is about 3.2 percent. If you take a look at developed economies, Europe is growing about 1.9 percent. And so if you're somebody that is swimming and you know how to swim, you keep your head above water, you can see that despite the economic headwinds that a global economy faces, Africa is still doing reasonably well. Much better than developed countries and much better also than Europe in times of this. So what that really means is that African economies are very, very resilient. That's by the current situation that you see. There's no doubt about it. That Africa has been affected by the global commodity price shocks that we have witnessed. And a number of the countries are facing balance of payment deficit and some of them are also facing domestic fiscal imbalance. However, what we've got to figure out is the opportunity in the situation. And the African Development Bank is helping countries to do the following. First and foremost is to better diversify the economies. Diversify, diversify, and diversify. And secondly also is to provide them counter cyclical support that they need to be able to weather the tough times that they have. And third is the need to have continued strong macroeconomic and fiscal stabilization programs. And finally they need to build regional markets that will reduce the volatility that they face. So I think that prospects for Africa actually look pretty good for next year. I think African economies will recover very well and they will do fine. I have no problems with that. When it comes to the issue of the jobs that we're talking about, you know, my view is that the future of Africa's youth should not be at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. We have to create a lot of jobs for Africa's youth here. And in the jobs for Africa's youth initiative of the African Development Bank, we're gonna do this in three ways. First is to provide skills for our young people. In particular skills in sectors like agriculture, you know, as Grasa mentioned that, ICT in particular computational skills, programming skills, preparing them to be able to engage in ICT revolution that we actually seen today. We're gonna be establishing with countries what we call coding academies that are gonna allow African young people to be able to have advanced programming skills that they can actually program things and take advantage of cloud-based technology to be able to create new jobs and new applications. Now, I do not feel that, well, finally, we're also going to create a fund. And that fund is gonna be about $5 billion, which is supposed to help young people to have access to financing they need to grow their businesses, the kind of things that Tony Olumelu just talked about. Well, we can put about $5 billion into that to be able to work. Now, we regard to your question on whether the fourth industrial revolution is gonna create massive amount of unemployment. I actually think two things have to be in order here. First, we shouldn't be afraid of revolutions. We shouldn't be afraid of technical revolutions. Look at the things that are gonna happen with this fourth industrial revolution. You're gonna have smart grids. You're gonna have smart homes. You're gonna have smart cities. You're gonna have smart transportation systems. So these provide unique amount of opportunities for Africa to take advantage about it. So I think that the key really is being sure that we have the right kind of skills, the right kind of educational systems that prepares us for 21st century education to deal with the kind of technology and innovation and entrepreneurship demands that that fourth industrial revolution poses. But two points need to be brought in mind. Last China, for example, economy actually looks more to domestic investment as opposed to light manufacturing. And they're gonna take a lot of this manufacturing capacity outside. Well, Africa is the place to be. The wage rates, industrial wage rates in Africa for skid labor is 28% of what it says in China. Industrial wage rate on skid labor is 18% of what it says in China. So Africa is the place to really be, we regard to this. However, for that to really work, it means we have to get infrastructure in place. We have to get financing in place. We've got to be able to be sure that Africa can take advantage of this industrial capacity that has been externalized. So I don't feel that the fourth industrial revolution will lead to massive job losses. We just have to prepare ourselves to take advantage of the opportunities that it presents. That was a fantastically comprehensive response. But I'm just gonna see if I can bring a couple of our coaches in to add points. Just firstly with Grassa just to answer on the point about women's empowerment and just very quickly of something practical that we can do. I'll be very quick. One of the things we are doing with our networks, it's exactly to engage companies which are in stock exchange because they are in the public eye. To engage them, the chairs can say, do you have any problem to find women who are competent enough to be in your board? We are here, we can help you and we provide the list of women who can be candidates. Second, we train women with experience, expertise just to have self-confidence, to be in a board where sometimes there will be a minority. They have to be self-confident enough to perform and it to be taken seriously with their contribution. We do also train young women so that it's not only the adults, the young women who will become potentially those who have to enter into decision making levels. Just to be very quick, we are doing practical things. I am old enough to say, I've been talking for many, many, many years. Now I have to do things and I have to present measurable results. We are trying to do this. If you like, we can talk outside here. Absolutely and I think if we're just looking in the places where men are, we're not gonna find women. So we need to be a little bit more imaginative about where we look. Tony, I can see you wanted to come in on. Yes, I like to speak from my experience as I am the chairman of S.O.D.I.N.S. I say, Grooblice Invest in Banking, Relational and Sputality, Oil and Gas, Power. And we have five listed public quota companies of the five public quota companies to have female CEOs, to have female CEOs and to have female chairman. And United Bank of Africa, which is a Pan-African band operating in 19 Afghan countries, has five board committees. On the five board committees, three of them are chaired by females. The credit committee, which is the most important committee of the bank's chaired by female. The finance and general purpose committees chaired by female and the nominations and governance committees chaired by female. So I would say we're doing that because it's not just that, I have seen from my experience that female colleagues are usually very, very trusted, are very trustworthy, are very professional and indeed are productive. They put in, they don't have distractions. They put in everything to their job. So I like to share this with others to consider as a mega-poor person. Fantastic. And I know we've got to release our coaches to go to meetings, but very quickly, I just wanna bring in for final word, Tariq and Dominic. Tariq? Yes, I'd like to go back to the theme that I discussed and I think the easiest thing to do, but sometimes in some respects, but the thing that doesn't seem to get done is that we need to focus on how to reduce trade complexity, how to make it easier to do business. I'm a firm believer that if we're able to do that, the opportunity in Africa is large enough that the capital and the entrepreneurs will find their way if we can just get out of their way. And I think if we can focus on making it easier to do business, I think that will be the lowest hanging fruit and the easiest thing to achieve coming out of this conference. Dominic? Just a quick thing on the technology and jobs, which I think is a critical issue. I very much agree with the point that we have to embrace it because it's coming whether we like it or not. I think China has embraced it, even though they have to get 400 million people who don't have high productive jobs at all out of the poverty level and so forth. I think e-commerce has helped do that. But the point I just wanna focus on is it requires the sort of education revolution. And we know that in a four to six week course for someone who just has high school education in Africa, we were doing this in Nairobi right now, we can train them to be able to do a technology ready job. It doesn't mean going to university. It doesn't mean going to a vocational school. It's a four to six week program. And I think we have to change that mindset and how we do it. Other organizations around the world, business is taking ownership of that. Last point I'll say, if you look even in the US where this is a big issue, AT&T, largest infrastructure investor in the United States, CEO says, 60,000 of my 260,000 may no longer be ready because of technology change to do it. He doesn't say we're gonna fire them. He offers a training program which costs $200 with a university and internet education provider and will enable and allows employees if they want to train themselves while they're working to be able to have a job in the future. And I think we need to see more of those examples out there and it's doable. And I think we need to revolutionize of the way we learn. That's a fantastic point. And speaking as a former university professor, I can only concur that if we look at education as a way of socializing young people, we're missing out on the rest of people's lives. Thank you all very much. Final duty for our co-chairs, we would like a group photograph of each of you before releasing you to your sessions. So thanks for your time, everyone. Look forward to seeing you in the sessions throughout this world economy forum on Africa.