 it's great to see so many participants in attendance online. Before I make my opening remarks, I'll let you know that as a consequence of unexpected developments in the operational environment and contrary to the earlier communication, UNIWIDE would be the sole host on the Scotland's. For those of you who are less familiar with the Institute at the National University World Institute for Development and Chemistry Search, UNIWIDE was established about 35 years ago to provide economic analysis and policy advice to aim of promoting sustainable and equitable development for all. I think it's sort of an overstatement to say last year was for our Institute, as for most people, one of the hardest ever. So the COVID-19 pandemic wreaking havoc and leading to unprecedented challenges on all fronts of development. One of our most cited studies shows that that might be up to 200 million new people living under the poverty line due to the pandemic. Africa is one of the regions that are hardest hit. A number of countries in the continent are already facing serious economic challenges, even before the pandemic, such as low economic growth, monetary constraints, and rising debt work. Like the rest of the world, many African countries have undertaken various policies in a bid to suppress transmission of COVID-19. These measures may have met public health objectives to a certain extent, but they've adversely affected economic activities and livelihoods of the poor and vulnerable groups in the society. That in the 2030 sustainable development goals will now be very challenging, particularly in the face of diminished resource flows. Due to this new developments occasioned by the pandemic, UNI wider has reoriented the focus and organization for events since last year. This year, we will be able to concentrate on creating dialogue and sharing knowledge on the multiple effects of COVID-19 in the developing economies, states, and societies. This conference has served as one of the much needed forum for this discussion focusing on Africa. One year has now passed since the novel coronavirus disease was identified. It's time to take stock and chart the way forward in Africa. Another major opportunity to dialogue on these matters would be our annual conference, the wider national conference, which will take place on September 6th to 8th this year. The annual conference will discuss the implications of COVID-19 more broadly focusing on all developing regions. The key messages and questions raised in this conference will help to inform the general debate on the topic, as well as the discussions at the September conference. In this conference, we'll discuss socioeconomic implications of COVID-19, development challenges, emerging opportunities, and policy solutions in the context of Africa and the continent. The conference will feature speakers from international development partners, scholars, and policy experts, as well as our very own UNI wider researches. This is a two-half-day conference. In the first day of the conference, which is today, we shall discuss the development challenges and the impact of COVID-19 on African economies, starting with a keynote address with Dr. Vera Songway, UN Undersecretary General, and Executive Secretary, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, UNIKA. Followed by a panel discussion and with Q&A at the end of each session. Tomorrow, we'll have two main sessions, each consisting of three presentations. The first session will focus on the implications of the pandemic on livelihoods and well-being. The second session will be a panel discussion on the new normal and the future development of Africa. This session will offer some insights on the kind of future to ambition for Africa towards the pandemic. It is now my pleasure to introduce to you Dr. Vera Songway, our keynote speaker. Vera Songway is the UN Undersecretary General, and the ninth Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa. They're going to be the first woman to lead the institution in a 60-year history. As the Executive Secretary, Dr. Songway's reforms, focusing on ideas for a prosperous Africa, have brought to the fore critical issues of macro crime instability, developing finance, private sector growth, poverty and inequality, digital transformation, and credit commitments. Recently listed as one of Africa's most powerful women by Forbes, named as one of the 100 most influential Africans of the genre of freak in 2019, 100 most influential Africans by New African magazine in 2017, and one of the 25 Africans to watch by Financial Times in 2015, Vera Songway acknowledged for a long-standing track record for providing positive advice and a wealth of experience in delivering developing results for Africa. With this introduction, you can all agree with me that you would have made a better choice for a keynote speaker for this conference. Also keeping in mind the pertinent role UNIQ is playing in the development process. I would like to invite Dr. Songway to present the lecture. Dr. Songway, over to you. Thank you, thank you very much. I have a set of slides that will come up in a few minutes, but before I start, let me thank of course the head of the UNIWIDER, Pachi Madantan, my former colleague for having us here today as the Economic Commissioner for Africa, for having me. I think again, UNIWIDER's platform is a very important platform for having this debate to see where Africa can learn from the past, take stock of what's happening and then see how we go forward together. This is a global pandemic. We will need to all work together for it to be able to for us to be able to win the challenge. Listen, my talk was supposed to be on Africa's challenges for the crisis, what we need to do, how we need to get out of it. I would like to go through, just as a summary of the slides, what's happening on the health side. We've seen in the last, I would say two weeks, an acceleration in the case fatality rates on the continent. What we see now is essentially, it used to take us about a week. We would lose a hundred and took us a week, 146 days to lose 20,000 people. So 146 days to lose 20,000 people, sometime in March of 2020. Fast forward to today, and actually it is sobering because last week or two weeks ago, it was taking us 26 days to lose the same 20,000 people. And of the data of last Wednesday, which is yesterday, it's taking us 15 days. So we're losing nine times more people. We're losing people faster, nine times faster than we did at the beginning of the crisis. Clearly Africa is in the second wave. We need to find ways of getting out of it. And again, as most of you must have seen, there is now the South Africa strain, the UK strain. So yes, we do have the semblance of a vaccine, but will that work? So we are almost where we were in March of last year, but with a lot more uncertainty on the health side. Africa is facing three crises at the same time. It is facing a health crisis. It's facing an economic crisis health. If a health pandemic, I should say, it's facing an economic crisis and it's facing a climate challenge. We have to address all of these things together. One of the unique problems with this particular crisis is also that it's a global crisis. It is not a crisis of one African country's making. It is not the crisis of the continent's making. It's an external crisis, which requires the global commons to come together to respond to it. Now, you must have read many of you in many newspapers the fact that next slide, the fact that Africa did well last year, Africa came out of the crisis better. And that is true. But in 2021, we are not as prepared. We got into 2020 with a lot more buffers. We had fiscal revenue that was coming in. We had good reserves. We had good macroeconomic stability. So we could actually respond to the crisis. Our growth was better. The crisis has dealt a severe blow to all our growth. As you can see here, the blue line 2019, the red line 2020. So getting into 2021, growth is already being depressed. Already we were not growing that fast. And so essentially what you're seeing is again, a huge dip in growth for the continent, which means that we are not prepared or we are not as if we assume that we have prepared in 2020 to deal with the crisis. And yes, our countries put together almost $49 billion to respond, drawing from their reserves, drawing from their revenue to 2020. 2021 has hit us and COVID is still here. The climate challenge is still here. But we have run out of revenue resources to respond to the crisis. What does this mean? This means that our debt is going up. Our debt to GDP, of course, if growth dips, the denominator reduces. And so the share of debt to GDP goes up by definition. But also countries have had to dig deep to be able to respond to the crisis. So what we see is a rising trend in debt to GDP levels on the continent. Overall satisfactory debt to GDP levels and debt to GDP levels that are below 60%. And as you can see, we start hitting the 60% mark. If you can see this a little bit small, but if you can see the graph on your left, we start hitting the 60% mark just as we hit Rwanda. And so all of those countries after Rwanda have a debt to GDP, which is higher than 60%. So this means that these countries are getting into a moderate to high risk of debt distress. And then we have to face the problem. The graph on your right is essentially the middle income graph that gives you a sense of where the middle income countries are. And as you will see, even the middle income countries are beginning to see a surge in their debt to GDP levels. Prices, inflation, inflation has gone up. As you can see, the red is 2020 and the blue was 2019. Inflation is always a precursor of hardship for particularly our vulnerable, our informal sector economy, because it means prices of everything are going up. It means life becomes difficult. It means the ability to be able to feed one someone, one's family becomes even more difficult. But also inflation has proved to be a huge cost of social pressures across the continent. We know that if we look around those Burkina Faso, Mali, Sudan, every time we have had one of those crises, it is because inflation has been running rampant. And so we do need to watch this rising inflation in particular countries to make sure that it doesn't cause in addition to COVID and the economic downturn social crisis. Increased private sector external debt. Of course, I talked about the debt problem already. We talked about the debt stock. Our debt stock is increasing, but we're going to need more resources to be able to respond to the crisis. We, of course, COVID, all the sort of external supply chains, global supply chains were disrupted. The Swiss Canal, where Egypt, for example, gets almost 30% of its revenue was shot for almost three months. There were no traffic going through it in terms of trade. Essentially, Africa could not trade with the world. Could not trade with Africa because people closed their borders. And so, again, an important source of external revenue, foreign exchange earnings for Africa was lost because of the crisis. We now need to figure out how we're going to bring that back. I talked about Africa facing the crisis and on the economic front, remittances. Many of the African countries depend on remittances for foreign exchange earnings. Over 10% in some countries, Gambia, Camero, Seychelles, Morocco, countries that depend on remittances. Remittances are an important component of economies, as we know, because they send direct resources to individuals that actually help ensure that particularly the poorest are lifted out of poverty. We know particularly for women that they depend on remittances. We know that a lot of kids cooling and a lot of healthcare costs are taken care of through remittances. So, when you have 3% of remittances are the share of Africa's GDP. When you lose that, then we start to construct about our construction in GDP. But more importantly, a drop in an increase in poverty because of the lack of one of the tools that made Africa resilient. Foreign direct investment. So, remittances, essentially, if you wanna look at it, it essentially flows to the private sector, flows to individuals that essentially help individuals ensure that they can buffer crisis and grow in times of prosperity. We lost that. But then foreign direct investment, which is what creates jobs. So, on the one hand, you are not getting the remittances from the workers abroad, but at the same time, you're not getting the jobs or the businesses that are coming into the continent to create the jobs. So, you see for individuals, it is a double hit on both sides as we see on this graph. Foreign direct investment drops substantially in quite a number of countries, which also again means loss of jobs, loss of foreign exchange earnings. So, the crisis is for Africa in a very difficult situation. A lot of course, FDI is external financing, external flows. We could also show you data and statistics. Over 45% of the small and medium enterprises on the continent stopped their activity, lost their clients. So, even the internal private sector was itself was suffering, had to let staff go. The informal sector for 70% of Africa's economy depends on the informal sector. When markets are short, when economies are short, when borders are short, we know that the informal sector also falls into trouble. Africa was doing much better. I've given you all the reasons why globally at the macro level, we're not doing well. Our revenues have dropped. We have to spend more to respond to the COVID crisis. So, expenditure went up, expenditure went up, fiscal deficits increased, widened. We have to borrow more debt is going up. So, on the sort of large macroeconomic side, we're under stress. On the micro side, remittances are dropping, FDI is dropping. So, no jobs, no resilience, no buffers for private sector individuals and households. And of course, one will expect that the good progress that we were making in terms of getting out of poverty is going to be reversed because of the crisis. What has also happened, it has exacerbated inequality. When you think about it on the continent, those who have access to the internet and only 17.8% of the continent has access to stable, affordable and accessible internet. So, those 17.8 households have actually afford to continue keeping their kids in school. But we know that we have over 200 kids that are out of school, which means they've lost a school year. They begin to fall behind. Human capacity skills development is being lost. I showed you the price of food and inflation. Inflation means that only the wealthy can continue to afford basic commodities and basic essential necessities. Travel becomes difficult for everybody. The small and medium enterprise woman who was trading across borders can no longer do that. And so inequality becomes even more exacerbated. That is the problem. You're combining our poverty with inequality as a combination. Achievement of the SDGs, of course it's going to be a lot more difficult as we go forward. What we are trying to do and what we say to ourselves is we hope that if we continue to charge on, keep the SDGs, keep Agenda 2063, as initially stipulated, we may actually get there. What are we doing? What is the response? It is a tough crisis. It's a global crisis. If one country has COVID, all the countries have COVID. A big ray of relief was the vaccines. The vaccines have come on board. We are seeing many more countries have access to the vaccines. The United States this morning actually just announced that they're going to vaccinate even more faster than they had initially indicated. So maybe by the summer, all of the United States will be vaccinated and the economy would at least be able to begin to get back to some kind of operability. When we look at the map of the world for vaccinations, we see that a lot of the different parts of the world are already vaccinating themselves, but Africa remains a little bit less able to vaccinate all of the continent. Some countries are already vaccinating. We have, particularly in the North, Morocco, it's vaccinating. South Africa of course has started receiving the vaccine. Seychelles is receiving the vaccine. Guinea has started to some extent receiving the vaccine, but in very, very small quantities. We are expecting like every other country in the world to see whether we can reach herd immunity by vaccinating 60% of our population. There is a response from the COVID facility that is going to help Africa. The COVID facility, of course, is a global facility that has been put together by international donors to support Africa vaccinate 20% of its population. The African Vaccines Initiative is also working to vaccinate another 20. And so we still will have a gap, even with these two initiatives going hand in hand, we will have a 20% gap to be able to meet the 60% herd immunity that most countries are targeting. So there is still a lot of work to be done. We do need additional resources to procure the vaccine, the different vaccines out there, AstraZeneca, $3, Pfizer, more in the order of $7 to $9. So they're quite expensive, quite different pricing, but also the effectiveness is very various. And now we have additional strands coming on the continent, which means we have to think about how we will respond to these new varieties and whether the existing viruses can respond to that. The world has also responded. So there's a COVID facility that will help Africa respond to the crisis, the AVAT, which is an African facility. The G20 has also responded to the call of African finance ministers to see whether we could suspend debt payments. We saw that our debt was going up. And of course, when the debt is going up, you're interested in your debt and all that, it's going up. And so the G20 was able to say in 2020, don't pay for your debt service, not your debt, it's your debt service. So it's the interest rate that you pay on the debt for the low income countries. What that did was it resulted in about $5 billion savings for the continent, savings, $5 billion that could be replowed into getting PPE kits now looking at maybe procuring the vaccine, but ensuring that countries had enough liquidity to response the crisis based salaries and ensure that basic commodities that were needed were in place. There has been an injection of financing for the continent altogether, which as the multilateral development banks, African development bank, the World Bank have come together as well. And some resources have been put to ensure that at least businesses can continue, but not nearly enough. Africa in total, if we step back, has received an 2% of GDP as a response to this crisis from the global community. Africa itself has provided or extended to itself 2%. So a total of about 4% altogether to response the crisis in additional liquidity. The middle income countries of the world have provided about 6% of, have provided and received about 6% of resources. The high income countries have injected 20% of their GDP into the economies by way of new liquidity, new resources to help them respond to the crisis. So I was talking about inequalities in economies that in people before, but if you just look at those numbers, Africa has received 2%, it's have injected 2%, so you can say overall 4%, the middle income countries, somewhere between 6% and 8%, the developed countries 20% of additional liquidity to respond to the crisis. These are some of the issues that we all have to deal with is where do we get this additional revenue? Where does Africa find the additional resources to respond to the crisis? Of course, the crisis is going to set a blow to Agenda 2063 and Agenda 2030, but there are rays of hope. As we know, on the ICT sector, the other day we had a big conference here with President Uhuru Kenyatta and a couple of young CEOs on the continent, amazing things are happening on the continent in the internet and ICT sector, which we believe will create and fast-track Africa's recovery, but we need to recover. We need to get out of the crisis first before we recover. Africa's banking sector is in stress, but the Africa's banking sector has proved resilient and is one of the ones that is sending and providing additional resources for renewed investment on the continent. We need as we go forward to find an additional $100 billion to respond to this crisis. There is a lot of conversation and you will hear out there about Africa's death and Africa's debt crisis. In the beginning of 2021, three countries have taken what we call the G20 debt framework resolution. Those are Utopia, Zambia, and Utopia, Zambia and Chad. The rest of the countries are still showing some resilience and it's for this reason that we need additional liquidity to be able to make sure that those countries that are resilient can continue to grow and can ensure that they get out of this crisis without becoming, without falling into much more massive crises. The faster we can get help, the sooner we can get out of the crisis, the sooner we can move from response to recovery to growth. But that recovery has necessarily to be green. It has to be a recovery that looks at what are the enablers for the recovery energy. We have to reinvest, double down on investments in energy so that the private sector can come back. We have to double down on investments in clean agriculture, greener, better, more productive agriculture. We have to ensure that our parks, our wildlife is better managed because tourism was beginning, the service sector and tourism financial sector were beginning to be in particular important parts of Africa's economy and we need to go back to that. And so when we look at the response, we have to look at it as first, what is our immediate needs, which is an immediate need, what we call the immediate response is liquidity, additional resources, that's what it means, put new resources into the hands of government, into the hands of business, into the hands of the private sector, into the hands of individuals by way of social safety net. That immediate response of liquidity will help us save the crisis, get our PPEs as individuals, get vaccines as countries. But immediately after that, we need to start thinking of what is the recovery going to look like. And that's where we start thinking about how we can use instruments like debt swaps, instruments like what we call a liquidity facility, instruments like green bonds to see whether we can raise more resources, more revenue, want to create jobs but secondly to begin to grow. And over the long term, I think one of the things that this crisis has shown is that Africa but the global international community is not prepared for these kinds of global pandemics. We don't know where to go find the resources. So if you are in a wealthy country, of course you can give yourself additional liquidity through instruments like what we call the special drawing rights, you have a strong currency. So the markets can allow you to continue to have access but if you're on the continent, we do not have the instruments. We have to look to the international financial institutions who then need to look into their own accounts to see whether they have enough resources, where can they find new resources and it takes a year before Africa gets a substantive and robust response. So as we go forward out of this crisis, we do need to begin to think of what is this new international architecture that is going to be needed. We know that we're going to have another COVID. We know it may not be a health crisis. It may be a technology crisis. It may be a climate crisis. What we know for sure is another global crisis will come and we do need to start preparing for what a global response to a crisis like that would look like. So I think these are the three steps of how we look at and consider our exit from this COVID crisis is immediate response, liquidity, for the countries that have run out of liquidity and already in a debt crisis that will go into a debt sustainability framework, we will have a reprofiling and restructuring of their debt. But for most, we hope that we can grow out of it with additional liquidity, new and doubling our investments in women, in ICT, in the enablers infrastructure globally. Of course, Africa in January one, and this is my final point, past the African continent of free trade area agreement, which is the blueprint for investment on the continent. And we hope that with the African continent of free trade area agreement, Africa will do better and we will be able to lift ourselves out of this crisis. Thank you for your attention. Dr. Sarge, thank you so much for your presentation. And you raised several points here, which I wanted to ask you a few questions before we also have questions from the audience. And your first point that you raised is so important is the vaccine rollout and how important that is. And the rollout covax in particular. Second point, all linked to the question about recoveries around debt relief. And then the third point that you also made among other points, you also talked about remittances and foreign investments and so on, but also the question of three phase recovery, immediate, the next one, and then the system reset. Now I had a set of questions, one on vaccines and one on the public health issue. It seems that if you look at the mortality rates in Africa, the mortality rate to COVID is far lower if you use case fatality rates for example, or normalized by population than in many other parts of the developing world. Now again, there are arguments that are being that either it's because of very, very effective public health responses, probably conditioned from experience from handling Ebola and other such similar sorts of diseases. Or it could also be the demographic profile of Africa, very young age profile. Would you have a sense of what you think is probably more important explaining the relatively lower case fatality rates that we see in Africa? That's my first question. Do you want to answer that? Yes, please. I just want to caution about the sense of optimism. I think I started by saying that we were losing, it was taking us 146 days to lose 20,000 people on the continent in March of 2020. However, in February of 2021, it is taking us 17 days to lose 20,000 people on the continent. So I think that optimism that we had in March of 2020 and the narrative that you have, which is that Africa's kids fatality rate at that time was low, is no longer the case. So now that we have the statistic that tells us that people are dying seven times faster than they did from March through June and even maybe through August of last year, the question is what is different? And I think what is different is that Africa was prepared, Africa was better prepared from March through August. If you recall, we didn't have an access to mask and the PPE crisis. Most African countries did not debate the issue wearing masks, we wore masks. Countries shut down. We had at the time over 80% of our economies were totally shut down. Offices were shut down, markets were shut down. There was a lot of social distancing happening, hand washing. So I think the Africans followed the science and we did the right things and we did it to the best we could. Now what happened? Christmas came, big holidays and we forgot the science. And so it wasn't about our age population, it was about us leaving the science. And by leaving the science, we started getting the same case fatality rates like in most other countries. Also remember that we are not testing as much. So the data that we have, if you look at it, we're supposed to test 100 per every 100,000 people in the population. Today, only seven African countries are actually reaching that testing number so that we can talk sustainably about where Africa is. And so I think when you look at some of the anecdotal evidence that tells us that hospital beds are full, that Kenya is about to run a new survey on sort of fatality rates that are not reported to get the better sense of what is really happening. Uganda is going to do the same. So I think the most important message is we need to continue to follow the science. It's not about our youth, it's not about our demographics. Yes, what we have learned is we've learned a lot of important lessons from the Ebola crisis about how we can deal and how we can respond to pandemics. But I think more importantly, we must respond with the science, we must wear the mask, wash our hands and we must social distance. And we saw that when we didn't do that, we started losing people just as much as... Actually, I think in the end of December, our case fatality rates were becoming the second highest in the world. So we hit that mark like everybody else. That's a very important point here because there was this view of African exceptionalism in the sense that because of the age profile, you didn't have to worry so much about the science. But the point you make, it's very, very relevant, especially as you move to the second and the third wave, that science is really important and all the things we know from the public health measures that we've seen being effective in other parts of the world is also as important in Africa. And that's a very important message to get across. And I absolutely think that's really a very important factor. There may be other issues around the age profile so it might have helped, but they were not the most important reason. I have a question on the question of debt relief. As you know, there's been a quite a discussion about increasing special drawing rights for our countries. As you know, the umtat, for example, has a very large increase in STRs and so on. And it seemed that there was quite a resistance of this from particular parts of the world where the view was that why should we do it? Now we have a change in the political leadership in the US, for example, and so on. Do you see much more possibilities in the increase in STRs? But that would be a very important way to provide liquidity, as you mentioned, to the European countries. Yes, so STRs are special drawing rights for those who are wondering. Special drawing rights are essentially central banks printing money. So it's new money that is printed. The first time we saw special drawing rights used in the middle of a crisis was in 2008 when we had the financial crisis. When we had the financial crisis, the OECD countries got together and printed money, liquidity, to be able to help them get themselves out of that crisis. And it is from that experience that we are saying, well, now we have a global crisis. It's even more important. We're standing to lose, the world stands to lose somewhere in the other 10 trillion dollars from this crisis. So why don't we use the special drawing rights again? And so the Economic Commission for Africa, we're calling for $500 billion new issuance of special drawing rights. But it's not enough to just issue special drawing rights because the special drawing rights when issued, so this new money, let's just call it that, this new money when it's issued is relocated across countries based on their quarters, which is essentially their size of their weight in the global economy. This will mean that Africa does not get a lot. We ask, we will need about $100 billion. If $500 billion of special drawing rights were issued, Africa only gets 21.5. So it's a very, very small amount. So we're also asking for a reallocation of those special drawing rights. As I said before, and as we will see, the big debate in the United States is a new stimulus to the other of almost $2 trillion. That will take them to about a $6 trillion similar to the GDP of the whole continent. It's 1.2 trillion. So they would have added an injected liquidity into the United States economy six times the economy of Africa. Those are the magnitudes we are talking about. So essentially, yes, we believe that there is a little bit more appetite for SDR issuance, but we're pushing for more. We're not just pushing for SDR issuance, we're pushing for SDR issuance and the reallocation of those SDRs so that Africa and the emerging market economies can get a little bit more liquidity to grow out of the crisis. Thank you very much for that. That's very important to keep in mind. We need a reallocation too, not just to increase the allocation. Let me take some questions from the audience now, and I would like the audience to ask to send more questions to the Q&A function. I would like to see a little bit more questions. The first question there is about, and you talked a little bit about this in your presentation, fiscal and monetary policy. How should it face the development challenges because of COVID-19? Could you elaborate a little bit more on how you see monetary and fiscal policy working together to handle the macroeconomic crisis? So in the developed countries, they have used both of these tools to respond to the crisis, mostly the monetary tools, but they've also used some fiscal tools. There was a lot of forbearance, for example, in terms of tax payments, businesses were asked to defer tax payments for three months than another three months. There was actually a stimulus that was given on the other side to businesses. There was a huge injection from the public sector of social safety nets. We saw an increase in social security benefits, food banks and things like that that we put in place. This means that government lost revenue, but continues to expand on the expenditure side to support its economies. On the monetary side, of course, you use your central banks and your central banks. So at the global level, we talk about SDRs, but at the national levels, we talk about fiscal stimulus. We saw that the European Union, for example, injected somewhere in the other of $759 billion into its economies. This is the central bank of Europe, essentially just printing money, issuing new papers so that countries can have access to more liquidity. So when you do that, then you can ensure that businesses continue to have working capital, that businesses can still have their export credits. They can import more importantly because countries need foreign currency to be able to import goods. So that's the monetary tool. And also you can use that monetary tool to manage your inflation rate so the prices don't go up very hard. Now on the continent, because we don't have what is called a hard currency in many of our countries, maybe except South Africa, our currencies are not robust enough. We've seen actually some of our currencies, even including South Africa, lose 20% of their value during this crisis. So it's very difficult for us to have the kinds of monetary policy tools that we need, which is why we cannot ourselves provide endless stimulus to the economy. We need some injections of foreign capital or foreign hard foreign currency reserves to be able to provide that injection. The second thing of course is that because we still import a lot of our basic necessities food, even when the material we need for investment, we need effects, we need foreign currency to do that. So we need to be able to then purchase dollars or euros or something. And so again, we don't have a central bank or an African central bank, which is a big project of the African Union to be able to, well, it's one thing to have the central bank. It's another thing to create that robust currency that becomes a reserve currency that you can do. In Asia, as you know, when we had the last financial crisis in the, not 2008, but 1987, the Asian financial crisis, the Asians got together and created the Chiang Mai initiative. At the time they wanted to create something similar to the IMF with a strong currency reserve, but they ended up with the Chiang Mai initiative, which essentially just said, if we created a sort of buffer, a basket, amongst ourselves, we'll lend to each other in times of crisis. But because Africa is so, the correlation of our economists is so high, it's very difficult for any one of us to lend to the other in terms of crisis. But this is a global crisis and everybody is in trouble. So we do need global international institutions to provide that additional liquidity. And that's where I think one of the things that is missing as I talked about the response recovery and reset. And in the reset part of my presentation, I talked about revising and revisiting the international financial architecture. We do need to look as Africa about how we want to re-engage the international financial architecture post those crisis. Do we need an African central bank? Do we need our economists to become more robust so that we can have currencies that are slightly more robust in times of crisis to deal with that? Thank you very much for that. In fact, a link to the question of fiscal policy, as you know, one of the most effective ways that we see advanced countries respond to this particular crisis is what are called following schemes, which is that they're providing ways of firms keep their workers on the payroll because what we really have is kind of aggregate supply shock. The pandemic is aggregate supply shock because people, firms cannot simply get back the workers back into the workforces. But it's more of a challenge to have following schemes or anything that allows firms to keep their workers on when you're lacking formal economies. They have a lot of self-employed. So how do you see that challenge? The challenge of trying to keep the informal economy which has been very badly hit, as you mentioned in your presentation. How do you do that when you can't use a mechanism that's been pretty effective in the Western countries? Well, I think what you do there is then you do cash transfer programs. And unlike in the Western economies where we have, of course, large manufacturing companies, we still have small and medium enterprises. And what you try to then do is see whether you can help business, the banking sector, provide additional loads to those small and medium enterprises so they stay open. Because a lot of them again are essentially businesses that are doing, providing local services that can continue even within the crisis. They can transform of course their businesses immediately to online orders. We've seen and we've done some studies in Kenya, Nigeria, and I think Morocco where we saw that businesses that were linked to the internet and could actually continue their businesses through the internet survive the crisis much better. And those ones we shouldn't show that they get the additional capital that is needed. So what government could do is essentially do what the United States has done and others but we don't have the liquidity is inject, provide some more capital to the banking system, see whether they can reduce interest rates so that the private sector can get on. That isn't sort of the continuing business side. The other thing that we can do of course is that we're in dire need of new investments in the infrastructure sector. So one, there is, it is not inconsistent to actually launch huge infrastructure projects. This is what China did to come out of the 2008 crisis where you hire people. And so rather than you do sort of food for work schemes. So you build infrastructure but you provide additional resources. And finally, of course, there is a whole category then that becomes vulnerable that is just going to need some resources to make it through the crisis. And then they will need some kinds of social safety net injection. But then because they are informal it's difficult to find them. And this is where I think technology becomes important. Can we find ways of getting these people into systems that will provide additional, we can know. I take an example. I think when we talk about it, it's quite theoretical. I take an example of Egypt. Egypt has 3% of its population which is below the poverty line. But 40% of its population is vulnerable. These are the ones in the informal sector. And that 40% falls. How do we catch them? How do we find them? Do we know where they are so that we can do the cash transfers so that they can survive at least the crisis and then get new injections of capital to continue their business. So I think these are the kinds of things we now need to do is begin to build databases of those that need help and then differentiate the help. And do you see that? I mean, do you see a leveling up of technology in terms of using them to reach cash afford which is the pool of cash transfers, mobile phone banking, so on? Do you see evidence of that? Because clearly technology has become very crucial. Remote working, for example. I mean, do you see that? In Kenya, I think that the central bank will have a problem soon because there is almost no use of cash. Every day, the number of transactions that are done through mobile systems and internet systems is almost $200 million. It's all done virtually. And so I think that if there's one example of a society that has almost moved to a cashless internet-based society, it is Kenya. And I think that's really the sort of vision of the future is how can we do more of that in many more of our economies? So yes, we are seeing an increased use of technology to respond to different challenges. Health care increasingly in Wander and Garner. There was a lot of consultations that are happening online. So yes, we are seeing that. But of course, and this is where the inequality happens. It's possible where it's affordable and where there is access to energy and you have the basic enablers of the infrastructure. Where you don't, then if you're in Mali or Pokina Faso or places like that, then we see that gap widening. We also see the gap widening within societies. Women have less access to the internet and can afford it because it's too expensive. Then there is a widening gap between men and women again in terms of income levels. So I think we do need to look at closing all of the steps. Otherwise, as we celebrate the sort of migration to the internet and to technology, we will also have to begin to look at mourning huge inequalities in our societies via countries and also gender discrimination. Absolutely. Thank you for that. It's a very important point. I had two questions now against the audience. One question is going back into the question of the pandemic and its effects. The question is that some countries have taken a deniered approach, have denied the pandemic's effects, not trusting the science and just fixing the effectiveness of the vaccine. What implications do you see of this on African cooperation in the pandemic and the economic recovery in the future? There has been some uneven response to the use of science on the pandemic. Would you see that as something that can be worked on and can have more cooperation on these issues? I think that the Africa CDC has done a fantastic job in bringing the continent together. They have managed our scientific researchers together to sort of have a common position on how to respond to the crisis. So my sense is that one of the things that the crisis has done is really bring some of these communities of practice together. And so what we will end up seeing probably at the end of this crisis is much stronger collaboration around issues of science, issues of research. There is a huge move now to see can Africa begin to research around vaccines and produce vaccines on the continent. So my sense is... And then of course there needs to be more communication around what some of the science is saying and why it's saying what it's saying so that people begin to believe it more. So it will take some time maybe and some geographies for that to happen. But we were actually just talking and ECEA would launch a survey together, hopefully with Africa CDC, to get a sense of sort of how much vaccines, anti-vaxxas do we have on the continent. We don't believe that number to be quite hard. Thank you very much for that. Then there's a question that I was also going to ask but the question comes from the audience that in that, as you mentioned, the need to provide liquidity to the system. And already as we know, the discussion is going on in the U.S. is that concern about inflation. The Biden stimulus practice is quite, has a significant positive fit and adequate demand. Do you see that saying, especially as you mentioned also, given the depreciation of the currencies and food being imported that creates additional cost pressure inflation. So is there a danger that with the stimulus we might see an increase in inflation post pandemic? There might be a small spike but I think the danger is that you see an increase in inflation but combined with a scarcity in food as opposed to at least some provision of some of the necessary working capital for us to be able to continue to produce more local food that will bring down the prices because this is the challenge, right? If we can import, so why we need the SDR is why we need some of that liquidity is that we need to import the irrigation rates. We need to import the fertilizer so that we can produce the food domestically and bring down those prices. So in some sense Africa still has this balancing act to play, right? Which is essentially that a lot of our food commodities are still imported. So there is some substantial component of even locally produced food which is induced from foreign spending but until we do that we cannot really then begin to talk about a recovery into the economy but then if we get again that additional liquidity we can get jobs back on and with jobs back on with more revenue on the demand side you can also begin to flatten the inflation curve. So we can attack it from both sides but we need that liquidity to be able to help us do that and do it in a way that works sustainably. For that, also now I want to shift a little bit towards the longer term and what we might tend to see over the next few years. Now one of the things that we found and this is work that we've just finished people that we've just finished in UNU wider using new data on economic transformation for a lot of low-income countries in Africa and elsewhere for the most recent period, not the COVID period but just before that we find a manufacturing renaissance. We find that while there was de-industrialization as you know the discussion on de-industrialization till about the 2000s from the 2010s onwards we see a manufacturing renaissance employment in manufacturing has been increasing in many African countries. Of course it seems and this is also worked by other economists like Danny Roderick and Maggie McWilliam that it seems to be more in the smaller firms. The employment increase has been mostly in smaller enterprises not so much the larger perhaps more enterprises. The question that I would have is that if that's the case which seems to be fairly robust is finding of a manufacturing renaissance. What does the pandemic what do you think is the pandemic on this? Would it be quite unfortunate if this manufacturing resurgence is stalled because of the pandemic? But of course it's not obvious how the pandemic might affect manufacturing per se. How many commodities of course because of declining prices and so on you can see that. How do you see the future manufacturing in Africa especially if you now seem to see some kind of a renaissance and some kind of a resurgence after a period of de-industrialization? My sense is that we would see a growth in the manufacturing sector. One for a simple reason that what the crisis has laid to base the sort of enormous dependence of the continent on imported commodities. When the crisis hit for example we realized that Africa was importing almost 75% of its jobs from outside the continent. That was about $14.6 billion or an equivalent of about 6 million jobs. I think that as you know we begin to think about the recovery. More countries are thinking of setting up pharmaceutical centers in their country. So the huge imports of drugs and health commodities from Europe and Asia is certainly going to reduce because there's going to be I think a push. I think we've seen an additional push in the manufacturing textile maybe more related sector around PPEs but increasingly also a push around other health related commodities. And that then can allow countries to begin to think of what diversification strategies they want to put in place. But we have also seen and I want us to make sure that we don't put one or both the other huge progress on the sort of technology economists. Countries are diversifying into the technology sector which is also quite important for the services sector that we need. So my sense is that as we come out of this crisis with a combination of the African continent the free trade area agreement that allows the continent maybe to pull together its supply chains. Because one of the things that we've been missing if you want to produce battery storage for example on the continent which we can do and which we should be doing you will need South Africa's platinum bond is nickel and DRC's cobalt. It was very difficult to do that before because they were both in very different economic zones. And so tariffs and non-tariff barriers were quite extensive with the African continent of free trade area agreement we hope that those barriers are broken. And so you will begin to see new industry come up. I think you're on mute. I have quite a few but I know you're constrained by time. So let me just on question that I think is interesting which is linked to what you said just now which is that we talk about technology but we need a good regulation. We also need competition. So what about regulatory frameworks perhaps linked to the free trade area discussion that can make sure that first technology is hardest because technology is not regulated as we know can do harm. And secondly also in terms of competition we need a strong competition policies which is perhaps not been the case so far in many African countries. So regulation and competition how do you can make some progress there? So the economic commission for Africa and the African Union last year put together the digital strategy for Africa. And I think what that did was begin to lay the groundwork what Africans are heads of states and saw as a vision for how Africa develops an EE economy particularly linked to e-commerce. In the international community as you know huge debates at the WTO how you regulate e-commerce what we need to do. So the push that Africa is doing is to say we need to harmonize but we also need to ensure that that regulation is regulation that is consistent with the ambitions of the continent. And I think a lot of work is going into that to ensure that when we get to those global spaces we actually do have an African position that is a position that says Africa needs to also grow towards prosperity and we need regulation that will work. Now this is at the international level at the continental and country level we also do need regulation of course of privacy on management of data on data storage. And I think a lot of countries that are beginning to put those regulations in place again Kenya is a case in point but Tunisia stands out as a country that's putting in good regulation, Togo. So we're looking across the continent to see where we have good regulation. The biggest issue is of course data privacy use of data but there is also regulation around pricing around access around the last mile and all those things that come together for us to actually be able to build a sustainable economy. Secondly on the question of competition policy of course, of course, of course the second round of the African continent free trade area agreement is going to be dealing with issues of industrial policy, competition policy, intellectual property rights we are trying now to bring in the whole question of e-commerce and e-regulation. The competition policy so far has not been sort of given the right place on the continent. We've had a couple of sort of large quote unquote monopolist in our economies but mostly we've had the small and medium enterprises but I think as our economies continue to grow we are beginning to see the need for more and better competition policy because there are now new entrants into our economies of way. If you look for example at the ICT sector mergers and acquisitions last year we're almost $2 billion of the whole sector. So we're beginning to get big giants and we need to understand how you regulate and how you manage those. In the financial sector the same is happening as well. So I think that if we thought we did not need competition policy before now more than ever we'll do because we need to begin to understand in the financial sector with some of the banks that is sort of the bigger banks and the mega banks in some of our economies we need to begin to provide a space for a level playing field across the continent and that is becoming even more important which is why we believe that competition policy will be important. I suppose the question then would be that we need smart competition policy. I mean for example you mentioned the example of Kenya and Pesas a great example here at SafariCon. So you want competition policy that actually incentivizes innovation so you don't want to stop that innovative firms whether they're in finance or whether they're manufacturing or services. At the same time of course you want to stop monetary policies and you don't want to you want to make sure there is a level playing field. So that's I think the going to be the big challenge isn't it because smart competition policy is very difficult and it's also we see that even in the Western countries to find the balance between allowing for innovation especially for technology firms at the same time stopping monetary policies. So in your view I mean to what extent do you think one has we have seen the movement towards those kind of smart competition policies and is there a question of training competition people working competition authority and so on because this is also needs relevant knowledge of how to do it. Yes, I think when you look at the competition policy laws in Europe I think one of the best and strongest competition policy institutions is the European the Treaty of Rome I think it is. I think that we can learn from that we can and it has actually stood the test of time including for the ICT sector. Actually one of the interesting things as you and I know is that the Europeans were the first to prosecute the big IT firms because they had a competition policy structure that was a lot more robust than the United States policies but I still believe that again part of the process and competition policy is really being able to as you say being smart which means taking into account the new dimensions of competition and of technology as we go forward and we're learning and we are understanding for example Bitcoin how do you regulate Bitcoin where do you start with the regulatory process of Bitcoin if you want to do a level playing field for something as ephemeral as that. So I think there isn't still a lot of work that needs to be done and a lot of learning not just on the continent but also working together of course with the international community the Europeans I go back to say I think still have one of the most robust competition policy structures and laws which we could learn a lot from but the United States as well if we look at their competition policy laws we see that the Sherman Act things that we can learn from particularly as we begin to go into the CFTA and we're looking at inter-country trading what kinds of regulations that we want to put in place to make sure that this works and works effectively. So there is enough material I think from the past that can help us to design something that is I will say sufficiently robust economically but then also response to global and unique challenges that the continent faces but at the end of the day competition policy is about unfair price practices or unfair non-price practices that induce different demand choices and I think that's that is where we want to end up. I think we have to be really careful about using competition policy for other ends it's really about ensuring that there is entry and I think that as Africa grows and as Africa prosperous what we are going to see is some destruction because to sort of have that creative innovation and to have more entry there is going to be destruction. The danger I think for the continent is that we try to protect and we've seen that in many places we try to protect all nine sectors or even companies at the detriment of the sector. So if you have a government oil come well-making business and you don't close it down you can never get renewable olive oil or canola oil or whatever oil production happening in those economies. And so for Africa right now the scale actually is that competition policy has to address government state and enterprises and whether governments will have the courage to sort of put in place policies that allow for their destruction in pure sort of industrial policy ways. And that I think is going to be our biggest challenge. The second biggest challenge is going to be on the way of competition policy. Can we regulate at Google when Google comes onto the continent? Do we have enough is our policy robust enough are our institutions strong enough to ensure that when Google comes it doesn't begin to practice unfair trade indulge it on fair trade practices that we cannot regulate because we're just so happy that Google has come to our economies and it's creating some jobs. So there will be tensions and there will be again, like you said we will have to be smart about how we do it going forward, but it is clearly something we need to look at. Thank you Dr. Song, that is very helpful. I think the point that you as you made is that you have to allow for certain firms to die or to exit. That's a whole point of especially with the shift that we're seeing in technology post pandemic that's going to happen. And I think that's where governments have to take the lead in accepting that that would have to happen including that firms that they themselves might be also owning or part owning. That's very important. I'm going to now draw the session to a close. I know that you have to leave at this point. Thank you so much Dr. Song and I think it was very interesting to for not only the presentation with the Q&A to discuss so many different issues we talked about and I think just to end, I would say that what's really important and this is where you NECA and UNI wider and where UNI at a nation university as such you mentioned Michael Lee, the Fakima Denton at UNI Indra it's that we need to have a stronger evidence base going forward to think about possible solutions. That's what's really, really important. And certainly in UNI wider, that's what we're doing trying to create a stronger evidence base more than what we know about the pandemic's effects because we're having a better picture but also the future. And I think that's where I think the UN agencies wherever whichever they might be across in Africa and elsewhere need to get together and think of how to create a strong evidence base. That's going to be absolutely crucial. I would say, would you agree? No, you're very right. And I really want to thank you, Kunal for this session. I think one of the areas where we need more evidence base work and where we are working together and I hope we can continue to work together and Ms Denton and her team is in the climate change. We haven't spoken a lot about it. But again, as I said at the beginning of my presentation we have a health pandemic, we have an economic crisis and we have a climate challenge. And we do need to also think about how we resolve that because actually they're backward linkages, right? As well, Africa today and some of our economies and 19% of their GDP because of climate impacts. So we do need to work on that and I really cherish, I think the collaboration that we have with UniWider on this particular issue. And of course, then we could do a lot more together but UN agencies in general collectively could do more and we are doing more in many cases already together. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Dr. Songbe. It's been a pleasure having you and look forward to more collaboration in the future. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.