 Thank you very much. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. This afternoon's very important session on visa openness. We talk so much here this week in Kagawa about connecting Africa's resources, how can we connect our resources if we can't travel around the continent, where 55% of African nations require visas, so a main driver behind enabling better regional trade, regional movement. Dyma fod yn ystod y llwyddi ar y cael yr aflwgrifedd, y Cynghreif Llywodraeth, ac mae'r cefnod Fyraig Gael Llywodraeth nid yw'r unigllun yma. Fod a lawrwch mewn cyfrif gwaith i gyrs continuefyd yma o gyfraeg maes yng Nghaerdydd Llywodraeth. Mae'r llwfodor allan o gerdyniadau mythaf am yr ymgymru, oreid cael yr ymgyrch cyfarid yn digwydd y panel, mewn cyfraeg mysgau i'r Cynghreif Llywodraeth, Ia Degi Adasina. We all know he's the president of the African Development Bank based in Abergan. Great to see you again. Another co-chair this morning, Dominic Barton, Global Managing Director of McKinsey and Company. Thanks for joining us again. John Moreng, you're very pleased to have you here this afternoon. Chief Executive Officer of Rwanda Air. Of course you've been involved in efforts to open up the skies of Africa, so I'd like to hear your perspective as a business leader. We'll also be joined by Carlos Lopez, Undersecretary General, Executive Secretary of the Nations Economic Commission for Africa, based in Addis. Carlos is unfortunately just tied up on the BBC debate. He's just finishing now, but we're going to start without him. We don't want to wait any longer. President Adasina, maybe I could ask you to start by outlining some of the key findings from the report. Well, thank you, and welcome to this session. First, let me say that as we all look at the impact of the global commodity price shocks on Africa, all eyes have to turn into what really happens in the regional market. I really believe that as we develop the regional markets in Africa, we will reduce the susceptibility of Africa to these global commodity price shocks. And for that to happen, it means that we must expand significantly the level of regional trade we have today. African countries only trade 11% among themselves, and that is far below the rest of the world. If you look at Asia, it's worth over 40%, and if you look in Europe, it's about 70%. And so Africa needs a bigger size market, it needs a better integrated market, and it needs to have the mobility of people to be able to move across to do that. Some progress is being made. Already intra-Africa business investments, we talk so much about foreign direct investment, but investments Africa to Africa investments have expanded significantly from $10 billion to now $50 billion a year, which is a very good indication of how things are going. However, there remains a couple of challenges to being able to succeed with regional trade. First is still high tariff and non-tariff barriers, so you have infrastructure challenges and power on roads and ports and rail and also transnational highways, and you still have sometimes a not very favorable business and investment environment. But the most critical thing that we are talking about today is about the ease of travel. And that's why the African Development Bank launched the Visa Index, the Visa Openness Index, together with the McKenzie and also with the Global Agenda Council of the World Economic Forum. Essentially, what is it that we are trying to do? We are trying to drive a continental visa policy reform program for all of Africa. We want to make things very simple. We want to remove many of the challenges and the procedures that are facing many people when they travel. We want to make sure there is reciprocity on visa issuance across countries, and we want to promote talent mobility all across Africa. And this is a very important tool for being able to achieve the Agenda 2063, laid out by the African Union Commission. So what are some of the findings of this report? First is that Africans need visa to travel to 55% of African countries. Africans also need to get visas to travel to 25%. They can only get visa to travel to 25% of the countries. And Africans don't need visas at all to go to only 20% of the countries. And if you look at the issue of openness, if you take East Africa, Central Africa, North Africa and Southern Africa, you find that the openness index is much better for East Africa, but also for West Africa. The openness index is much lower for countries that are in middle income countries. It's more difficult for people to travel, for example, in the openness index in North Africa. It's actually much worse than anywhere else. I think the progress that has been made in the ECOWAS protocol, but also in the East Central Africa protocol, accounts for a lot of the success that has been recorded. What are some of the solutions that we propose in this report? We should make it easier for people to get visas when they arrive in Africa. We should have visa-free regional blocks, just like we have at the East Africa community. We should have regional block visas so you can actually go to a region just like the Schengen, and you have that kind of open movement. Africa spends a lot of its time on issuing single entry visas, and that's very expensive for travellers and also investors. We should have multiple-year visas, 10-year visas. There's no reason why a businessperson has to go back and get the same visa 10 times. Just 10-year visa for business investors to be able to invest across. We also think it's very important to simplify the visa procedures and also the level of documentation that is required. Finally, it's that we must eventually move to the Africa passport that allows Africans to move freely all across Africa. This has been proposed by the African Union Commission. We are strongly supportive of that from the African Development Bank because we think it's going to make Africa to Africa investments much easier. Let me just give you an example of how difficult this is. Aliko Dangote, which is Africa's richest man, told me at the Africa CEO Forum that he needed to go to some countries, but he wouldn't let him in. You don't let your richest African into a country just because of a problem with a visa. That just tells you how difficult that issue is. Just to close, I want to say that this is something we are going to be doing with our partners every year. We will release the next one by February of next year, and that information will now begin to look at the cost of actually issuing visas and also to see how we make progress with e visas in Africa. We are very delighted about it. We think it's fundamental to how we have labour mobility and labour market integration and also promote investments in Africa. Thank you. Dominic, my simple question is here with all your vast interests at McKinsey companies. Why you got involved in this scheme? Well, for a number of reasons. I think President Adesina did a great job of laying out the context and the benefits from growth. The need for a more regionally integrated economy will lead to more growth. We won't be as dependent on external factors, so there's a lot of the rationale. But to be very selfish about it, when we look at Africa, there are 700 companies that are over the size of $500 million in sales each. One could say that's small or large. I think it's actually small for the size of this continent and where it is. But one of the biggest challenges for those companies in becoming more significant, and by the way, there's not a single African country in the Fortune 500, which I think again makes no sense. I really hope that that's going to change. But to be able to grow and build the depth of expertise you need to scale and you can't scale if you're just restricted or limited by your local national market. So the ability to be able to play across a broader set of borders is vital to the vibrancy of the corporate sector. So at a very selfish level, having more free movement of people and resources is going to make a significant difference to growth and to the success of these organizations as we go through it. I think that we're again very proud to be part of this effort and we have to start somewhere. And I think the benefits of allowing openness of people to move across borders is actually a key part of actually improving also growth in national economies. I think there's been too much of a view of a zero-sum game. If I open it up, are businesses or are there going to be social costs in my national economy that will be badly affected. And evidence shows quite conclusively out there that in regional trade agreements that you have, and I would look particularly to the NAFTA agreement, the North American Free Trade Agreement, very politically difficult. I think it was only passed by one vote in Congress when it went through. The combination of those three countries together in terms of what it did for the collective are very significant, so they're difficult. So again, we have to start somewhere. We're in the digital age or we're talking about the fourth industrial revolution. The fact that it takes so long, especially for people within Africa to travel in Africa is just an ancient regime in our view. So we're excited. I think we need to monitor progress and I think having this index will be an important peer pressure for us to be able to monitor progress and really begin to accelerate more of the regional integration. If you can't measure, you can't improve. A brief welcome to Mr Lopez. Thanks for joining us. We'll let you get your breath back. Let's take the view of the business leader here. So Mr Marengi, what does it mean to you having a more freer liberal regime in terms of moving people around the continent as head of Rwanda Eir? Oh my God, thank you very much. First of all, that's great news to us as operators. You probably appreciate the difficulty that we go through. First of all, Africa is not rich as yet to be. And with that, you find that all these barriers that are put by our own governments just keep pulling us back as businesses. To put this into perspective, you realize at times that it's so difficult to even get a visa in countries where our people live, because there are no embassies in some of these countries. And then you have people having to cross into another country to look for a visa. And that is all unnecessary expenditure and time consuming and get back to travel. So that is traveling within the same African continent. But more to the business. I mean, naturally it will contribute more to what we do. Once it becomes easy and free for people to move from one African country to the other, you can imagine that is all that we will be looking for that will increase the traffic in terms of business. But also something else that I want to throw here. While you're working, like the president of the ADB just mentioned, when you're working with the bureaucrats and the politicians for that goodwill, please also throw in something else that is rarely discussed and this is from our perspective, liberalization in the sky. And that is also very important because for now most of the African sky is not liberalized. So we as operators are extremely competitive. We are exposed to airlines beyond the continent that have more access to the continent beyond what we as operators within the continent can even access from governments. So it's again a problem as you put it where people think that if I open up probably this is going to unload my value, but let me also share that in Rwanda we have already done it and I mean as an airline we played our part to make sure that happens. We have removed visa requirements for all Africans travelling in the country and let me tell you there are not a million Africans that have been swam in Rwanda to stay legally or anything. So it has only from an airline perspective it has only made us more value, more business today you can pick up passengers that are transiting out of Kigali but just because they want to go into town and see friends or even just do some little tourism stay over for a day or two and then continue with their journeys and the other way round has always worked but we are not getting any respocation from anywhere else and I hope this study is going to kind of push our people to get into life but what I want to say is it's a great idea I hope it can happen tomorrow. Interesting to see whether there will be a joint momentum for visa openness and open skies. Mr Lopez, alongside your work with UNICA you are a chair of the Global Agenda Council on Africa why did you select this project as your major work stream? Well we are very proud of this work stream and the results it has produced so far and a word of gratitude here for the African Development Bank that has been behind stabilizing this new initiative through support for the research and housing it within its various initiatives and it is part of a larger effort of the Global Africa Council to really give credit to some progress that has been made in the reflection about human capital for the development of the continent. Reflection now has to translate into implementation and policy design and it's happening and I think this index is going to be part of a larger effort that is championed by African Development Bank ourselves, the Economic Commission for Africa and the African Union to expand the discussion about regional integration to a larger number of indicators than trade. Trade is very important obviously and by the way Africa has been progressing on intra-Africa trade more than people think over the last five years about 4% increase which may sound small but it's quite significant if you actually contextualize and know that all of this has happened in regions other than North Africa where trade integration is the lowest but then you have a number of other factors of integration and human mobility is extremely important and if you look into the human mobility history in Africa despite our proclamations of Pan-Africanism it has not been really a very good storyline. Africans have been protagonists of 27 mass expulsions of migrants from other countries. This is really tragic and it continues to happen. The latest example is the debate that was very prominent in South Africa last year and I think it is for us time to really check what leaders are doing and governments are doing in terms of human mobility and this index is the instrument to actually be able to do so. I think when you regard the continent as being bigger in terms of land mass than China, India, US and most of Europe combined and you think that we only have about 90 aerial apps or aviation apps and only about 63 sizeable ports you can see how much integration we need really to make progress because this is an indication of failure in terms of taking into account the opportunities that are offered by a growing market that has already more than a billion people and it is going to grow to 2 billion by 2050. Thank you. Thank you. We are running out of time. I do want to have time for questions. Having read a bit about the report myself when it was prepared but preparation started three years ago only five African countries offered liberal access to all Africans but that number lept to 13 over the three a period. There is progress there. Let's see who has got the first question. Gentleman on the front row. Peter, I know your name but could you please give it to the rest of us on the audience online and who you are? My name is Peter Holmes Accord. My question to the panelists is just to get some context for this. What do people think that we are really talking about in terms of the population percentage of America this impacts? Are we really in low single digits of Africans that have passports but substantially higher than that percentage of Africans who cross international borders informally during the year. Aren't we talking about one, maybe two percent of Africans who travel on a passport for their international travel? Just getting the context from the panelists. Mr Lopez, I think I'd be a good place for you to start off. Yes, I can respond to that. In fact, most of the travel, if you want to call it that way, in Africa is protocolized by migrants that do it informally. You are right. I live in Ethiopia over the last six months more than 100,000 additional refugees enter Ethiopia. Obviously they didn't have a passport. So human mobility does happen in Africa in great numbers but not necessarily the formal way. But one explains the other is because there is absence of human mobility easiness that you have also situations where people have to find a way not through the formal means. It's not very different for trade though. Most of the trade by road in Africa is also illegal if you want to call it that way. It's informal. Not necessarily in areas where there is already a high degree of trade integration, like South Africa Customs Union. You don't need to do it because it's already part of the single market. But in most of the rest of Africa it is happening all the time. So even our statistics on trade have this deficit of quality that you have rightly pointed out. Let me just say that somebody who there was a time I travelled to one country many years ago and I arrived there and the problem was because I couldn't get a visa on arrival I was actually locked up and I was actually locked up and this was many years ago and after a while I sorted it out because it was a problem of you couldn't get the visa on arrival but then others that are not Africans who are coming for the same meeting could get the visas on arrival. That's how absurd this is. What's your point in terms of the issue of the proportion that is affected? You know, even what it affects is even 5%. If you got 5% of investors that want to invest a lot of money in other countries of course the experience they have is like the kind of experience I have that's a lot of money you've lost. Maybe you probably have a billionaire that you've turned away and that's it. And so I think it's not even so much of that is the fact that we want to improve the ease of people travelling and the ease of investment and doing business all across Africa. The second is that when you have like the ECOWAS passport or like the East African community passport here you want to have a communication. Yes we want to have mobility but it has to be we have to be able to account for who's moving because we also live in a world in which you have a lot of terrorist attacks and a lot of people that have on toward attitudes. So we want to be able to track that and I think that is why we think that you can have a form of identity but that identity card must allow us to be able to travel freely and so I think that's very important and I agree with him. A lot of trade that we have in Africa it's largely informal trade but if you don't have documentation sometimes when you make those trades people market women get cheated just because they don't have a form of identification so I think this should help quite a lot by having regional blocks for visas for people to be able to travel back and forth. Thank you very much. Unfortunately we have no more type of questions and schedules this afternoon. Thank you so much for joining us here wishing you the best of luck looking forward to the next year's index. Thank you all for joining us watching us here online and in the room as well. Thank you. This is now closed.