The development of regional value chains could see new vehicle sales increase from 1 million to 5 million units a year across Africa, according to Afreximbank.
Speaking at a recent online seminar to promote the African continent’s premier trade event, the Intra-African Trade Fair, to be held in Kigali, Rwanda, from 6 – 12 September 2021, senior trade facilitator Gainmore Zanamwe, said there were bright prospects for the sector.
The Automotive Tradeshow and African Association of Automotive Manufacturers (AAAM) Automotive Forum at IATF under the theme “Building Bridges for a successful AfCFTA”, would be a critical base from which to drive growth through the development of intra-African partnerships, Zanamwe said.
The value of collaboration around automotive manufacturing in Africa was highlighted as the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank), in collaboration with the African Union, concluded a string of virtual events raising awareness of IATF2021 and its intent.
Exponential growth possible for Africa’s automotive industry
Eight migrants drown, more injured off the horn of Africa
Staff from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) assisted Djiboutian authorities as they attended to the grim task of recovering and burying eight drowning victims whose remains washed ashore after a lethal journey from Yemen over the weekend.
The victims—from a total of 34 mainly Ethiopian and Somali migrants seeking to return to Africa after attempting to find work in the Arabian Gulf—make even more tragic a recent wave of Africans arriving in Djibouti.
“It was at night and the smugglers turned off all the lights on the boat, claiming we were being followed the Coast Guard. But they were lying,” 19-year-old survivor Galgalou Haji Wacho from Oromo, Ethiopia, told IOM. “There was no Coast Guard. They started hitting us with sticks and iron bars.”
Haji Wacho said he was in the water for nearly two hours, struggling to make out the coastline ahead. “I could not see anything,” he recalled. “It was pitch black. I did not know whether I was dead or alive.”
Africa Data Leadership Initiative
The Economic Commission for Africa raised the flag on data governance by jointly launching the Africa Data Leadership Initiative (ADLI) with Future State and Smart Africa, creating safe space for policymakers, digital rights experts and entrepreneurs to learn together.
The ADLI is a peer network designed for and by African policymakers, consumer rights advocates, and private sector stakeholders to ensure the data economy drives equitable growth and social progress across the continent.
The tripartite partnership is creating a peer learning and exchange network in pursuit of three interrelated and interdependent goals; creating a dynamic “safe space”; building a strong base of expertise; and contributing to broader initiatives.
Leveraging Smart Africa’s and ECA’s existing platforms, the organisations will promote the peer network among their constituents and solicit input to the data governance issues interrogated through the peer network.
V&A in talks over returning looted Ethiopian treasures in ‘decolonisation’ purge
Deputy director says museums must start telling a more honest story about provenance
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has started talks with the Ethiopian embassy over returning looted treasures in its collections, including a gold crown and royal wedding dress, taken from the country more than 150 years ago.
Ethiopians have campaigned for the return of the items since they were plundered after the 1868 capture of Maqdala in what was then Abyssinia. Ethiopia lodged a formal restitution claim in 2007 for hundreds of important artefacts from Maqdala held by various British institutions, which was refused.
Tim Reeve, the deputy director of the V&A, told the Cheltenham Literature Festival that the move was part of the V&A’s work to “decolonise” its collections and to have a more honest conversation about history.
“There is no dispute about whether or not they were borrowed; they were looted and that’s a story we have tried to tell very openly and very honestly at the V&A,” he said.
“Provenance is a big area for museums to invest in researching where these objects come from and how they came to be in these national collections. Being able to tell a much more rounded, holistic, accurate and honest story about those objects.”
Reeve said a long-term loan was being discussed as an initial step to returning the treasures, given the V&A and other national museums were forbidden in UK law to simply return items in perpetuity.
“We are in very close discussions with the Ethiopian embassy about those artefacts and how they might in due course find their way back to Ethiopia,” he said. “A long loan of those objects as a sort of an initial step is the kind of thing we want to discuss if the right kind of conditions are there and they are in agreement with the Ethiopian embassy.
“The next step is exactly as we’re doing with Maqdala which is to try and work out a way forward, a long-term solution for those objects.”
Hundreds of artefacts were looted after a military expedition to secure the release of British hostages taken by Tewodros II. The British victory culminated in the emperor’s suicide and the destruction of his fortress.
They are now held in dozens of institutions across the UK, from the British Museum and the British Library, in London, to the Royal Library at Windsor Castle and the Bodleian library in Oxford.
Reeve also discussed the future of funding for the arts sector amid the disruption of the coronavirus pandemic, describing the current situation as “cataclysmic” and at risk of “rolling back decades” of progress.
He called for the government to put in place a contingency plan for the small number of museums whose business model, largely reliant on income from visitors, was coming under strain in the current crisis.
“It doesn’t seem to me as a sensible approach to have to slam the anchors on in the way that all of these big museums have had to over the last six months and more or less start to build up from scratch,” Reeve said, adding that reintroducing entrance fees was a “false economy”.
“There needs to be something that is there by way of a safety net so that everyone’s not rolling back decades and decades of hard work and investment and creativity.”
(The Guardian)
