 Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, welcome this morning to this very important panel on the future of Africa. We all know that this year the Africa Union is celebrating its 50th anniversary. And as Winston Churchill once said, the father backward you can look, the father forward you're likely to see. So with this distinguished panel, I also would like to look 50 years forward. How will Africa look in 2063? What are these panelists' aspirations for Africa in the 50 coming years? And how to get there? As we all know, Africa, the perspective on Africa has changed dramatically the last years from an aid perspective into a perspective of economic growth, opportunities, and also investments. Looking at the 10 last years, eight of the 10 last years, the African lion economies have been growing faster than the East Asian tiger economies. Who would have believed that some years ago? Africa is also the youngest continent in the world, 70% of the population is under 30 years old. In 2040, Africa will have a larger workforce than China, but there still are obstacles that we have to look at to unlock economic growth, infrastructure, food and agriculture, skills and education, and also gender issues. There are still 17 of the African countries that are defined as fragile states. I think with this panel, we will be very much enlightened on the opportunities and also how to deal with the challenges. To my left here, we have President Kenyatta of Kenya. We're very pleased to have you here, Mr. President. We also, we have then the President of the Senate in Algeria, Mr. Benzala. Welcome, sir. We have Madame Franny Lottier, Executive Secretary of the African Capacity Building Foundation, Harara Zimbabwe. Then we have Arif Naqvi, Founder and Group Chief Executive, the Abraaj Group. Welcome, sir. We have Madame Benetta Diop, Chair of the Executive Board, FEM Africa Solidarité, welcome. And we have the Finance Minister Anders Borg from Sweden, rated the best European Finance Minister by the Financial Times for many years. So I think with this panel, we will have a great opportunity to share our views and on Africa moving forward. I would like to start with you, Mr. President. One of the youngest presidents in Africa, if not the youngest, newly elected in Kenya. Mr. President, what are your aspirations for your country and Africa in the coming 50 years? First I think we need to begin by looking to where we're coming from in order to get a clear understanding as to where we're going. I think we can say that the first 50 years, the African continent was largely characterized by the liberation struggle, the independence movements, and the feeling with the attainment of independence as if that was an end in itself. This is a situation I believe that was largely further exasperated by the East-West situation, and rather than looking towards our own ability to drive our nations and our economy forward, independence and power seem to be in itself an end in itself. This scenario you could see characterized by the series of coups that we underwent in the first 50 years of our independence, the inability of our own nations to integrate and to work together but rather seeing ourselves as competitors, others as complementers. This is a situation that led eventually to the beginnings of democratization in the late 80s, going into the 90s. But then again, that democratization was seen more as communities vying against each other for power, and not really focusing on the developmental mode, our economic growth, our economic development, and the need for integration. We in Kenya have gone through all of that, saved for the element of the military coups. But that struggle has been a struggle that we have been fighting through. A scenario which in 2010 saw us ultimately put in place a new constitutional dispensation, a constitutional dispensation that seeks to allay the various fears that led to confrontation or tensions within communities in Kenya. We now have a system of government where we have a national government, we have the devolved governments, where we are moving towards a process of inclusivity, understanding that we need to create and to begin to come up with developmental agendas that are more homegrown and capable and able of addressing our own domestic issues, the recognition that our region, our neighbours are not competitors, but rather we complement one another, we need one another in order to achieve our respective objectives and growth. In Kenya, for example, we are seeing that our greatest trading partner today is Uganda, and therefore the need for us to have greater cohesion. Our ability now to understand that regional insecurity is also insecurity with regard to our own domestic issues, and therefore the need for us to take a more aggressive or a more aggressive approach towards ensuring we have regional stability and security. We, for example, now have Kenyan forces working together with their Somali counterparts as well as EGAD and other African nations to ensure that we have a stable and secure Somalia with a recognition that instability in Somalia prevents us from actually achieving our developmental agendas. We are moving now towards greater integration with regard to the East African community, understanding our ability to open up our potential, rest with the ability to work together with our regional neighbours, the understanding that we need to have our private sector better motivated, and being the engines and the drivers of growth as opposed to government, government's objective should be to create an enabling environment for the private sector to succeed, our understanding that investment in our youth that is opposed to minerals and natural resources being our greatest strength. Our greatest strength is exactly what you've mentioned, our population, a youthful population that requires motivation, the ability to give them the skills to be able to take advantage of the growing opportunities that are available. So in a nutshell, I see in the next 50 years our ability to have our regional trading partners, our trading blocks becoming much more integrated, moving towards, for example, in the East African community towards a single currency, removing the non-trade barriers that exist, attracting investment not from a Kenyan perspective but rather from a regional perspective, empowering our youth and ensuring that they are able to be part and parcel of that development agenda as opposed to watching on the sidelines. This is the great opportunity that this continent has for the next 50 years, and this is really the focus that we in Kenya are really going to be centering our attention on for the next five years and hopefully 10 years if the people of Kenya give us another five. Mr. President, what would you say to a young Kenyan person regarding the five coming years? Where will that young person feel the difference after five years with you as their president? The first five years, what a young Kenyan should expect is the Jubilee government focusing on telling him that his hope, his future lies in his ability to look outward of himself, not his community, to be able to understand that it is through working together, it is through understanding that a process of inclusivity, a process of him being able to appreciate himself as a Kenyan and as an African is where his potential lies. To move away from the idea that your community, your ethnic bloc is your future. Your future lies with being able to work with other young men and women like yourself, in your country, in your region, to be able to fully exploit the potential that you have and that you have a government that will stand by you, that will create that kind of environment, that will enable you to be able to achieve those objectives with a broader and an outward looking as opposed to an inward-looking mentality. Mr. Nakwe, as a leading businessman and investor also in this continent listening to President Kenyatta and looking at the opportunities, no, in Africa, 50% of the population is no defined as belonging to the middle class. What are the prospects in your view for Africa and what does Africa need to implement of policies to even enhance the development? So thank you. I have to go back to something the President said. You asked him what would you expect a young Kenyan to say for the next five years. His response was, well, in the first five years, this is what he should expect. So I think that's a great reply because it means you're looking at a longevity of governance in your ability to change Kenya. I think the single most important thing that all people in Africa, not just in Kenya, expect, have a right to and look forward to is governance, more than anything else. I think Africa has gone through. You talked about fragile states, some of them and so on. I think Africa, more than anything else, both in the business community and in civil society, needs effective, strong governance models that are resilient, robust, and capable of being a part of the global community. And Africa, at the end of the day, is a part of a globalized environment. Africa is a crucial component of tomorrow's world. And it, for too long, has been neglected. It sat for too long on the side. And more importantly, I think the best way of summarizing the world's view on Africa is 10 years ago the economist would run a cover and call it the dark continent. And today, when the economist runs the cover, it actually says Africa rising. Now, the problem also with the business world and the business community is we tend to react far too quickly, and we tend to act in droves, and we tend to follow trends a little bit too aggressively. So a good thing can become a bad thing by too much money chasing it. And this is a voice of caution that I want to tell all my friends about, which is that if you think back to what happened in Russia in the 1990s or in Asia at the turn of the century, when you have far too much money chasing opportunities which are extremely stable, you actually land up screwing the opportunities. The real reality about Africa is the youth. The real opportunity in Africa is the youth and the fact that there are going to be 500 million Africans that are going to be living in cities not in 50 years, not in 30 years, but in the next 10. And these people, they're going to be 65 cities in Africa that are going to have more than a million people. Urbanization is one of the great trends of the 21st century. Mankind for the first time is becoming an urban race. And what that means is that our cities are going to be redeveloped, our style of the way we interact with each other is going to be redeveloped, and globalization in turn is going to lead to business opportunity, not just in Africa, but with cities across the world. Cities will start trading with each other. Within these cities, the most important component are the young people, because Africa has a younger proportionate population than anywhere else. And I think these young people deserve so much more because within the rest of the world, when you look at what's happening in Spain, when you look at what's happening in Greece, even in Tunisia, graduate unemployment is at an all-time high, which means that our generation has actually broken the social compact with the next generation. So we need to go back and revive and fix issues around governance, around education, do more for the youth, do more for SMEs, realize that the SME sector, the small and medium enterprise, is the real engine of growth, not big business, and actually not government at all. It's the SME sector. So employment will come from that, entrepreneurship will come from that, and most important of all, Africa's future will come from that. Thank you. Madam Lottier, you've been following Africa almost in whole your career and looked at what does it take to really create development. You've seen some positive results, know lately. What are your aspirations, and what does it take to really make Africa a prosperous continent with the opportunities that the young people of the continent really need? I think the first area that we need to look at is to have Africa connected, meaning we've put in the infrastructure that's needed so that you can go from one capital to the other without difficulty. We've removed the bottlenecks to mobility, because now it's very complicated to go from one country to the other with visas and other difficulties enclosed in that, that we would have removed the challenge of young people who are educated in one country being able to go and work in another, but finally connected because we have a common goal, a common vision that we all aspire for to take Africa in the right direction. The second aspiration I have is that we would tap into the creativity that we now see in pockets around Africa. You look at what's called Savannah Valley, the Silicon Valley of Africa in Nairobi. There are young people there who don't have a very high level of education, but they're working with the highest end of physics to develop technologies that can be used, whether how to charge your mobile phone on a bicycle, all kinds of innovations that use physics in a creative way. So the creative talents can be leveraged across the continent and delivered not only on the SME side, but on the stitching together between the political work that needs to be done and the administrative work to be done. The last area, which I think is a very important one, is that Africa will be capacitated. That 50 years from now we are not talking about skills and capacity, but it would actually be in place so that we can take on these investments, take on the conversations across communities. And the one difficult one on the capacity side is I hope in 50 years we would have reduced the sectarian and religious tension and kept it in a way that we are actually working together in a common direction. As the president, Ken Etta, shortly, Silicon Valley in Nairobi? Absolutely. If you look at the technological advancement that has taken place in Kenya and indeed in other parts of Africa and the new innovations that have been started up that are now being copied even in the developing parts of the world. And PESA, for example, something that has gone a long way towards ensuring financial inclusion for many citizens in Kenya. These are products that have been developed by young, aggressive Kenyans as a result of the infrastructural development that has taken place in Kenya and in Africa over the last few years, creating a platform that taps into the creativity of our people. So indeed, as far as I'm concerned, with the development of that infrastructure, with our focus on ensuring that we introduce technology even into our educational curricula, there is great potential that the creativity of our young men and women will indeed be the driving force of Kenya and indeed the African continent going forward. Mr. Borg, it's very interesting to see that Sweden is now sending the finance minister to our Africa summit. Five years ago, it would solely be an issue for the development minister. So this is also, in many ways, illustrating the change on the perspective. What is your perspective on the opportunities and challenges in Africa moving forward? Well, you asked me yesterday to sit on this panel and I was thinking, what can I contribute with? So I did a little bit of calculations on Kenya. I made two scenarios. As a true finance minister. A 50-year forecast for Kenyan development. I did one generic Taiwan, China, South Korea scenario, growth with 8% for 20 years, 7% for 20 years, and then 4%. Then Kenya in 2063 will have a GDP equal to where Sweden is today. So that is a possible generic Asian development that is mind-blowing. Kenya going in that pace. Then I did a second scenario just using the last eight years average growth for Kenya, and then we have two bad years, 2008 and 2009. So we are very close to the Asian scenario if we exclude eight and nine. But when we include eight and nine, the average growth is 4.85. If that remains constant to 2063, Kenya will be Poland. And I am going often to Poland. It's a very nice country. So the transformation a country can do in 50 years, and I think we should expect Africa to do in 50 years, is mind-boggling. It is the same kind of development my country did during a period of 150 years. It is what China has been doing over the last 30, 40 years. The prerequisites for these kind of mind-boggling scenarios is obviously openness. We need to learn from the Asians, an export-oriented strategy. One should probably not say this in front of people also from the IMF, but it helped that China also had an undervalued currency. It actually helped them to push growth. Agriculture transformation, which we will be talking about, is absolutely necessary. Structural transformation, where it's one of the reasons that I think Sweden can contribute. Going into light manufacturing, furniture, textiles, assembly, and so forth. This is what we are talking with our industry about. Can they go to countries like Kenya, Ethiopia, East Africa in general, and make investments? And I think there are great opportunities. So I think we can see that a scenario where actually Africa is catching up in 50 years is a realistic scenario. Optimistic maybe, but also very realistic. And I don't think we should look for perfection. Sometimes, especially in Swedish debate, taking the starting point that, yes, we should involve ourselves with different African countries when they are perfect. But if we're only going to be with perfect countries, we would only trade with Norway, and that would make us very poor. So I'm particularly glad for that illustration. But I go back to my own history. We got free trade in the 1850s because the American forced us with an American pork. We got a railway system because we borrowed money from France, which we never paid back, because they were beaten by the Germans in the French-German war. We got our textile industry by actually having an apprentice in the UK stealing a spinning Jenny. So it's not by being perfect you actually grow. It is by continuous reforming yourself with more openness, more rule of law, more accountability, more transformation. And it's the ability to ongoing reforms, to have one period, the second period, the third period. That's when you have this fantastic development. And I was thinking, where will I be in 2063? And I will make a promise. I will be in Kenya in Masamori with my great-granddaughter. And I will probably be on a walking safari. So the two new hips that I've newly received and the mechanic knee that they have operated on me, because I will be 95 years old. And my great-granddaughter, she will ask me, is it true, great-grandfather, that Africa once was poor? And that is what I think is possible. That's really truly mind-boggling. I'm glad I persuaded you last night to join the panel. President Ben-Sala, president of the Senate in Algeria, listening to the Swedish finance minister here and his story to his great-granddaughter, great-granddaughter, is he being too optimistic? Or do you think Africa can be in that state in 50 years? I'm very optimistic, and I'm even more so for Africa. And after having listened to the brilliant speeches by President Zuma and the president and chairperson of the African Union, I was wondering if I could bring anything new to the debate. But I think that the framework that was given us by President Zuma and the chairperson of the African Union, I believe that I should try to add maybe some new elements or to give more details regarding the continent and its development. I may sometimes make mistakes since my mother tongue is not French, but I chose to speak French and to use written speech in order not to make too many mistakes since I'm not expressing myself in my mother tongue. Moderator, ladies and gentlemen, since the launch of the African Union and the NEPAD, Africa has set itself a long-term agenda, a global agenda to ensure sustainable peace and development. Among the top priorities of this approach, we have the deepening of democracy, the strengthening of the rule of law, the promotion and protection of human rights. And for this, Africa has given itself some institutional mechanisms which deal with the political dimension of development. We are speaking about the African peace and governance architectures. The actions that have been undertaken in these areas have enabled Africa to solve most of its conflicts and to develop itself in a very democratic fashion and to improve economic management. This progress has played a very determining role in the economical upswing of Africa, which over the past 10 years has translated into an average growth above 5%. This is why I'm so optimistic. And that is why today the GDP of Africa has reached $1,700 million, which is an amount slightly above that of India. However, Africa is aware of the constraints and the remaining challenges that we will have to face in order to ensure long-term growth due to its vast potential, ensuring at the same time that our development is inclusive and equitable. The major challenges that we are facing are in the area of the diversification of our productive capacity in order to reduce the vulnerability of the raw material prices. We also need to improve and to enhance job creation in order to meet the demand, which has been estimated at approximately 10 million jobs per year by 2060. And these, of course, are jobs that will have to be created very fast. Inclusive growth, sustainable and equitable development, of course, mean that we will have to speed up the agricultural development as well as the development of our industries, which are the main factors of economic diversification and job creation. Africa has the ambition and the potential to ensure food security on the continent and eventually to become a net exporter of food products. We have set as a priority the industrialization of our countries as well in order to enhance the added value that we will produce through enhanced processing of our raw materials so that we can also join the global value chains. Furthermore, Africa has launched a bold development program for its infrastructure in order to facilitate regional and continental integration in order to be able to contribute to the global economy. Another major aspect for Africa is that of human development through, amongst others, the organization of practical training courses, education to promote entrepreneurial activities and innovation. We are very happy to see today that the economic activities in Africa are on the right path. Most countries in Africa have created an enabling environment for the development of their economies. We have got competitive advantages, which today I think are equal or above those of other countries in the world, with high returns on investments. These advantages are opportunities for Africanist partners to build public-private partnerships within various investment schemes, and in particular given the difficult economic situation that the world finds itself in today. It will be critical for us to pursue economical reforms as well as social and economic reforms to support the forecast of the African Development Bank, which is seeing the GDP of the continent to quadruple by 2060. And I think that these optimistic figures enable us to trust in the future of Africa. Thank you for your attention. Madam Diop, listening to the president of the Senate of Algeria, also underlining the reforms that are necessary, both economic, social, but also to cater for the young. And I know you've also been very much an advocate for girls and women in Africa. So we're looking forward to your take on this. Thank you very much. Madam Zuma said that in 50 years, we will see Africa prosper with peace with itself. I think that is very important, those two words. And for me, what is important is the change of attitude in Africa. I think that if we look at the issue of the young people, but the gender relations in our community, and I am sure that our leaders and our government are aware of working at the community level, at the grassroots level. And I think that is important. The issue of leadership. We need to transform the younger there. They know it. We need to bring them at the forefront in our institution. The women, as I said, the gender revolution. Going to have a gender revolution in this continent. The women are our assets, because we say that our capital are the human being. The majority in Africa are women. We need to invest on them. And they are the people who are the doers and the makers. We say to transform Africa, we need to invest in agriculture, all right? Fine, we invest in agriculture. But 80% of the farmers are women. And yet they don't own the land. What do we do with that? So we need to make sure that our government, that we are making accountable in the reform, they make sure that women own the land. Because if you don't own the land, how do you access to finance? So I'm not just talking about the political transformation, but the social transformation that needed in Africa. And we need to put the women and the youth at the center of this transformation. People say Africa has growth. Have you seen that growth? It's the first in the world. But when you go to our village in our community, do you see that growth transforming in the life of our people and our community? That's where we need now to put our emphasis. We don't do, we don't need to do business as usual. Business as usual, it's gone. We need to think out of the box. We need to invest on our community. It's the smart thing to do. It's not just the social justice that we are saying. It's a business. And women are ready for that. They are building their small and medium enterprises. They are in IT system. You see them. They are in infrastructure. They are in finance. I think we need to bring them at the forefront in the transformation. So that's what I think that we need to do, political transformation, but also economic transformation and social transformation. Thank you. President Kenyatta, bringing the women to the forefront, that resonates with you? I want to completely agree, because at the end of the day, economic growth that is not felt by the majority in the nation or in Africa is not growth at all. And I think that goes back to something I said when I made my introductory statements, that we need to be able to deal with some of the structural unblocks that have prevented Africa from achieving her objectives. That is one of the critical issues that resulted in our 2010 new constitution, where, for example, you cannot expect to empower women if, at the same time, you deny them the tools of that empowerment. Our constitution now recognizes that very important role, recognizes the role that women play, both in agriculture, social development, and economic development, and now empowers women and allows women to own and inherit land, which is something that was not possible in the future, earlier. This goes a long way towards ensuring that they are able to stand on their own two feet without necessarily saying they are dependent on the father, on the husband, giving permission for them to be able to establish themselves. We want and we have gone through and created a whole series of funds that are specifically aimed at youth and women, to allow youth and women to be able to capture their intrapreneurial skills and have available credit so that, once again, they are not necessarily dependent on the opposite gender for their own economic growth. So ultimately, I do believe, and I do agree with you, that if this growth that we are all seeing is to be sustained in the long term, it must be transformed so that it is felt at the lowest level of society, and that every individual, and that is the inclusivity that we're talking about, feels that they are part and parcel of that economic growth, so that there is ownership. And once ownership is there, sustainability is there. Mr. Boyk, when you're walking around in Masaimara in 2063 with your great-granddaughter, I think that was also important, is the granddaughter, how much of a role do you think gender would have played in this notion of, and the premises for the question, was Africa the continent that was once poor? Well, I think it's a very important part because in all societies that start to grow agriculture transformation with the enclosure movement that we had in Sweden or in the UK was about creating functioning property rights, access to markets and so forth. So that's obviously a very important part. But if I look at the data from, for example, Asia, and also what we are now seeing in Africa, I think in a 50-year perspective, we will have a very strong decrease in the birth rates because, and also of child mortality and so forth, because what we saw in Asia is not only to the one child policy of China because the data looks actually very similar for South Korea or Taiwan, a very fast reduction and a very strong progress. So I think we will have a lot more gender equality. I mean, if you take the perspective of a 50 years, I wouldn't be too surprised if Kenya is involved in the debate of the pension system then. How are we going to get birth rates up and how are we going to get all people to stay longer in the labor market? Because these transformations in Asia are likely to go faster in Africa and therefore, because the growth rates are now probably faster given that we can build on the Asian experience. So in that perspective, I think we're going to see a quite substantial transformation. Obviously it takes a lot of people and a lot of work and a lot of political decision and leadership that we're seeing here, but I'm a strong believer that this is possible. But this with the wealth and also trickling down to the communities, because we have seen unparalleled economic growth in Africa the last year. Six of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world are no Africans. How to make sure that this trickle-dones is an inclusive growth? Do you have any recipe for that? Well, I mean, Sweden experienced a very strong growth period where equality actually increased, and that was for many reasons, but I would just mention two. One was education. We invested a lot in education. So the differences in productivity among people are very small. Even the lowest educated in Sweden are pretty well educated, and this was already in the 1850s, 1860s. The second was that we deregulated a lot of markets. Income inequalities are built by monopoly and oligopoly profits. So when you have openness and competition and market pricing, you are actually going to see that some of the old families that had a lot of money back in the old days in Sweden, when they are coming into a free market with free competition, they're actually competition, and prices are becoming more an equalizing force. So education, agriculture, and more of competition, I think are three recipes for reducing. And social cohesion and equality and growth can go hand in hand. That is our experience in Sweden. We cannot only think about social inclusion. We have to think about growth and macroeconomic stability too, but it's possible to combine them if we use work with gender equality and these other tools. Madame Lottier, does this resonate with you? One of the things we've seen across the countries, when you look at the 50 years, there are three groups that, if you support, results happen. Mothers, and I'd like to congratulate Norway and Sweden for ranking on the top from the Save the Children report that came up on where it's safe to be a mother. It's not safe to be a mother in many places in Africa. When you invest in that, you do get the results, because then you get the reduction in birth rates, you get healthier children who have the right nutrition, and we know without the right nutrition you can't learn in school. So it links back to education. The second one is investing in farmers. And that means linking, and here, this is a very good movement when you look across Africa, constitutions have been reformed to give power to local governments. Because local governments are closer to the people, they are able to take national strategy, regional strategy, and bring it down to the average citizen. I think this is very, very important, and that's how you get results. But the third area, which I think is really critical, is that when the investments are being made, that the participation is not only at the thinking level and the strategy, but also in the doing. When we talk about all the young people we have now, getting them into the job market, that requires making specific effort to make sure they're there. This is the middle skills. We're talking about plumbers and welders. When I was growing up, I come from a family of seven. I have two children. In my family, my two brothers decided not to go to university. The whole family was shocked. They were pushing and saying, why aren't you going to university? Look at your sisters. They have PhDs and so on. My brothers went to Polytechnics. They learned a trade, they started a business, and now they're doing very well. So respect for middle skills, welding, plumbing, construction, tailoring, which are so important, are going to grow the SMEs that we are talking about, and they're going to employ the young people. We can't all have PhDs. Some of the PhDs means doing nothing, really. And I think we need to focus on that area as well. And my brothers are happy about that. Mr. Nakvi, you probably have a lot of PhDs working for you in your company. But looking at the daunting task, there is one billion people. But I also operate vocational school, so I completely agree with what you said. There's one billion people in Africa today. There will be two billions in 2050. This is like a daunting challenge when it comes to jobs and opportunities for the young people. Are you optimistic that Africa will be able to deal with this? Look, I think, first of all, we have to just call a spade a spade and be a little bit practical. When we talk about Africa, Africa is not a monolith. Africa is an interconnected series of extremely complex interrelationships driven by over 50 countries. So when we talk about Africa, we have to understand both the similarity and the differences. Second, we have to learn from history, and we have to learn from other places as well. The Africa model and the Africa thinking has to be evolved in Africa. I have to say that the finance minister of Sweden is Swedish, but he's also European. And more importantly than that, he is a post-conflict, post-Second World War European child of integration. Secondly, you take the examples of the Arab world. We have the President of the Senate of Algeria. The real reality in the Arab world is in the 90s, they discovered that there was something called the Arab world. And the reason they discovered that was because they realized through the advent of satellite TV that close to 40 countries around the Arab world, or whatever the number is, exactly, I don't know. But they all spoke the same language, which was Arabic, and they had a similar culture. So they found the similarities, and they built on them. The Europeans did that. The Arabs have done that. The Africans have not done that. And we are far away from that. And that is a very important lesson to learn, which is when we have forums like this around Africa, and we talk about the interconnectivity, we must also focus on the difference, respect it, but deal with it. And that, to me, is a very, very important criteria in how Africa will actually learn to live with each other. We talk about women. We talk about empowerment. We talk about vocational training. All of these things can be applied. We can have a checklist of 100 different things. But the real will, the real desire to work together has got to be driven by things like the African Union, not celebrating 50 years of loving each other, but 50 years of resonance on what can be done, building forward through their similarities. I think once Africa recognizes that, the future is very bright. Until that, we're going to have disconnected rates of growth. Madame Diop. Yeah, I think that just joining what you say, that's why we are concentrating of an African of citizen. Because I think that when we talk about integration, when you go across the border of Liberia and Guinea, you will see that this is the women that are already integrating. They are the one that are in the market. They are the one that are selling and buying. There is no border for them. And I think that if we look at Africa as the continent, not just the leadership, because our problem are our leaders, we are not coming here to complain on issues that conflict and the impact of conflict on our population. But we say that if we don't invest on the citizen, because those are the one that are going to make a difference. Those are the one that make our government accountable. And they are making them accountable. They are during election now. I mean, even the leaders want to rig, it doesn't happen. The people have their mobile phone. They are texting. They know what is happening at the port. So it's going to be an Africa with the citizen that control, of course, with a strong government, as you say, to play its role in the private sector, civil society. So we need to invest on those, the women and the children. There are the one that are going to make a difference in that. Want to follow up? Mr. Nakwe? Yeah, no, I agree with you. But it was something that we were discussing before we started the panel as well, which is that the women, the children are still, again, part of a bigger ecosystem, which I refer to as community. And I think the great thing that is happening in Africa today is the sense of community that is built up and specially driven by social media, especially driven by innovations in technology. Kenya is actually one of the world leaders in the application of mobile telephony. And I was telling the president something before we started, which is that a tool that was used for monitoring in the Kenyan elections that was developed in Kenya by young Kenyan people that came to my knowledge, thanks to a colleague of mine who was a volunteer in the Kenyan elections, I sent that to Pakistan where elections are happening tomorrow because it's open source architecture. And today they're being used by millions of people in Pakistan to monitor the Pakistan elections. So you see how the open source technology is not only, I mean, it's developed there and working everywhere. So the sense of community that is happening in Africa, thanks to social media and mobility, in turn is going to inevitably lead to the hierarchies in Africa needing to either understand or actually be caught up in the winds of change because Africa, more than anywhere else, the community drive is gonna overtake hierarchy and governments need to understand that. Yeah? There's one thing we haven't talked about yet which is the role of domestic revenue collection and investment. I think this is absolutely capital for us to evolve in the next 50 years into a very dynamic continent. When you look at countries that have been able to raise their domestic revenue collection, I think Kenya now only 3% depends on outside aid. And when you look at the role of small domestic investors partnering with private equity and other large foreign direct investment flows helps to build the kind of environment that's job-creating but it's also tapping into this creativity that's very vibrant in Africa. Mr. Boyk, how important do you think this tax collection and building a fundament that is solid when it comes to domestic revenues for developing countries? That's only one answer. Well, I'm obviously answering responsible for, a country with one of the highest tax rates in the world. I do a pretty good job in trying to cut it back. We are cutting corporate taxes. From 60% to... Well, we are actually below OECD average for normal workers now in income taxes and we have 22% corporate tax. I've cut it from 26 when I came in. So we are trying to cut back taxes and taxes are important. You need the revenue but you also have to have incentives for investments and incentives for particularly foreign direct investment. So it's better to tax the broad basis, the social fees, the VATs, also property taxes but not tax the most liquid and most difficult assets being people's willingness to work, being direct investments, being the profits. So have a broad tax base that is difficult to avoid. That I would say is the most important feature of a tax system and let's be clear, it's an asset that Africa has rather low taxes and I'm speaking from Sweden with trying to get a little bit more of normal taxes. So don't overdo the taxes. President Kenyatta, Mr. Anakvi mentioned this with intra-regional, intra-African trade. If you look at the trade in Africa between African countries, this adds up to only 12% of all the export of African countries go to the region. If you look at Europe, it's 60%. If you look at East Asia, it's 40%. How do you look at this with intra-African trade? What are the opportunities? Will you take any initiatives with your new mandate in this context? Most definitely because I believe that that's where the greatest potential actually lies. Because if you look at the volume of trade within ourselves, it is actually much lower than in other regions or continents. But there again lies the greatest potential also for job creation. If we take agriculture, for example, we import into Africa more agricultural products without taking cognizance of the fact that we have great potential in agriculture if we look at it from a regional perspective than we do or than most other parts of the world. The linkage is now that we're having, for example, with Ethiopia. Once a road is complete, once there are projects, for example, of sugar, they have areas where they have great potential for sugar growth, which equally Kenya has a great shortage and maybe not as high a potential in terms of sugar growth. So that again is a possibility of increasing our trade there. Isn't it 60% of the arable, not cultivated land of the world in Africa? Absolutely. And that's what I'm saying, the greatest potential in realizing that it is cheaper for us and creates greater opportunity if we invest not on the basis that we are investing in Kenya, but we're investing on the basis that the market that we're dealing with is a much wider market than our own individual nations. So the potential exists there and that is why we want to move towards, first and foremost, if we look at our East African community, a population of 122 million. The majority who are not even in the cash economy, the majority who actually operate, as Madame has said, across borders, that trade exists, it's not accounted for, it's not recorded anywhere, but if you look at the border between Kenya and Uganda, you have Ugandan farmers crossing over to sell their maize. I mean, that's not recorded anywhere. You have Kenyan farmers going across with purchased items from manufacturing, which again isn't accounted anywhere. This is where the potential, I believe, greatly lies. But can you see kind of a trade, a regional trade agreement also for East Asia? You have had SADEC for many years that also do free trade agreements with other regions, EU, EFTA, and etc. Would that be feasible? Would you, in it, say something like this for East Africa? We're actually moving first and foremost very strongly towards establishing a strong regional market within the EAC. And that's why I was talking about strengthening that particular common market, removing the tariff barriers that exist, understanding that already our own communities, our own populations are actually trading amongst themselves. It's us at the national level that haven't actually accepted SADEC and Matt on board, right? We are too busy protecting our tax base without realizing that the potential for expansion lies in easing the tariff barriers that exist. And that's where our growth potential actually lies. And our main and key focus will be the strengthening, the deepening, and also the expansion of the East African community as a basis of reaching our developmental objectives. Seems like you're agreeing strongly, Mr. Nakveh. Totally. I not only agree, but I think the president hit a point which is so crucial, which is communities are trading, communities are talking. The real issue in order to spur meaningful development, GDP change in percentage points is going to happen when governments start talking to each other and break those barriers. It is ridiculous that you have two countries next to each other and it is cheaper to import from China than the country next door. It is remarkable that you have to travel to a location four hours away to get to an airport one hour away. So it's these sorts of barriers that once they break down, which can only happen at governmental level, I think the spur to Africa as a result across the board is going to be not in half points and one points, but in multiple points. But this is also about infrastructure, isn't it? Lack of infrastructure investments. It can happen once that happens. And that's why the key focus has to be linkage. Linkage, linkage, linkage. We need and must be able, like I'm saying, to bring Ethiopia on board into the East African community is a question of completing and finalizing a single road of less than 100 kilometers. Now, when we've lived as neighbors all these years and we have not really prioritized the linkage of bringing 70 million people to join a community of 210 just because we have been unable to do 110 kilometers of road is actually a very sad story 50 years after independence. Mr. Boyd? Well, I think we should realize that infrastructure investments is very important, but also the regulatory structure. As I understand the pricing list of a kilometer per cent, we have the U.S. We have Pakistan at 2 percent and we have the U.S. at 4 cent. But in many of our African countries we are talking about 8, 9 and 10 cents because of the ology policy and a very poor regulatory structure in the transport system. I think the Rwandan show that they cut the transport cost with 60 percent by just deregulating the truck industry. And this is a very crucial important. And here I also think that people like us have contributed because big transformatory investments go hand in hand with what we need. The European pension funds are now earning 2, 3 percent interest rates on government bonds and poor European growths. They would be willing to invest in big projects, I hope for 30, 40 years with maybe 5 percent interest if they would believe that these transformatory infrastructure projects could be done. So if we could together bring the European pension funds with maybe help from the World Bank and others to try to do these transformative infrastructure investments, I think that could be a great advantage. But then we also need regulatory reforms and if we are talking about cohesion and agriculture, the regulatory structure of the transport industry is really a big problem in terms of cohesion and agriculture. It is too much profit and too high cost to come to the market. It is a very good example of how basically a deregulatory structure could help. But then also obviously very, very big infrastructure investments where I think we and others could play a part. Mr. Bensala, we are, I just heard that there is also no being finishing this road starting in Lagos and ending up in Algeria in the Mediterranean. Is this kind of the vision coming out of NEPAD and is it really happening? Yes, of course I was listening to all the people on the stage and I just wanted to give a few details on that road and that road that was launched by NEPAD and yes it is being constructed the Algerian part of the road has now reached the border of Algeria and we have already started the building of the road to Niger. But unfortunately due to political instability in the Sahel area has really continued the building of that road. There is however another project of gas pipelines from Nigeria to the Mediterranean and also optic fiber linking Nigeria to Algeria and the other countries around the Mediterranean. We have built highways linking countries of the Maghreb because from our point of view the African continent is one. We do not see any differences in Africa we don't think in terms of the countries north of the Sahara and countries south of the Sahara and actually Nepal's goals wants to link all those countries north south and east and west. So in that perspective we have really deployed lots of efforts and the cooperation between the two between the various sub regions is in a good way and I think we are going to go further and we are going to to execute all of those projects. There used to be dreams and those dreams are now reality and they are going to be other projects in our sub-region. Thank you. Coming close to the end of this great session I was at the close reflecting Mr. President about you just elected you got the mandate from the people of Kenya. You probably also reflected already as all good politicians on how you want to be remembered. What do you really want to achieve in Kenya and we would really like to know this in what are the like five things you would like to be remembered for and where you will not compromise. I think the first is being a leader who actually brought an inclusive form of government that was transparent and accountable to its citizens would be the first point that would be on my agenda. The second is the ability to realize the dream of our forefathers of having an integrated Africa at peace with itself and a prosperous with the ability to be able to tap on the greatest potential that I believe we have which is our young people. I think the third thing which is a dream that we also have is to see the political economic federation of East Africa. That is something that would be absolutely fantastic. The fourth is just as I have seen myself take over from my successor and he has gone into retirement at peace with himself. I would want to conclude my term and go home to peace with myself knowing that there is nobody I have to look over my shoulder chasing me because of things that I did when I was in government. Maybe joining Minister Borg and Masai Mara? That would be fantastic with our grandchildren speaking to each other and saying we used to be told that Europe was the place to be and it is amazing that you are now coming to live here in Africa and seeking visas to come and we will hope that your grandchildren is not saying this Africa used to be poor but no we see that happening in other places in the world. So we will all make sure that we collaborate and trade. I would like on behalf of all the participants to thank the distinguished panel also for the great aspiration of making Africa more prosperous, inclusive growth. All this requesting of course a prerequisite for this is investing in young people education gender. I think the panel has laid out a very proactive reform agenda for Africa and thank you for joining us and a good round of applause to the panel. Thank you.