Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana are saved, thanks to their agricultural resources, from the economic disaster that the Covid-19 is causing in Africa and following which 43 million inhabitants are returning to their original condition of extreme poverty. These are some of the data contained in the report which, under the title “Pulse' Africa” la World Bank released Oct. 8.
First of all, Southern Africa is the area that concentrates around 60 percent of the cases of Covid-19 surveyed in sub-Saharan Africa with over 24 deaths which in any case represent just 2,5 percent of the total world deaths. The report tries to predict what problems the virus will bring as a gift to a continent in perpetual recession and believes that the recovery of the economy should be between 2 and 3,2 percent not immediately but only in 2022.
This one, which arrives at the end of the year and in 2021, will be a historic recession, very harsh also because the wealth of raw materials available to the continent collides with a constantly collapsing world demand and with frequent price fluctuations.
Definitely the GDP of sub-Saharan Africa will drop by about 3,3 percent at the end of the yearwith heavier recession peaks for richer countries like the Nigeria which had a -6,1 percent for the second quarter and the South Africa -17,1 percent. Central Africa and West Africa have suffered less from the negative effects of Covid-19 on the economy - according to the report - than East and Southern Africa. Kenya, Ethiopia and the islands have also suffered the most from losing substantial tourism revenues. Senegal, the Ivory Coast and Ghana, protected by their agriculture, structured and growing, are experiencing a much less severe economic crisis.
Overall the virus is wiping out brutally five years of economic and social progress on the continent which unfortunately will have a very slow and very diversified territorial recovery. The report recalls that the problems induced by the crisis of non-African countries, major buyers of raw materials on the continent, are compounded by the worsening of some “historical” African shortcomings which will lead to lower investments by companies and families, a slowdown in non-traditionally advanced industrial production, a blockage of tourism, continuous variations in the prices of raw materials, sharply declining emigrants' remittances and, above all, a collapse in foreign investments.
Moreover – it is emphasized – the diffusion of one will weigh even more on everything suffocating corruption. This general deterioration will result in debt for the continent valued at around 3,5 per cent of GDP.
What needs to be done to contain the serious social and economic consequences? There are two indications that all experts, African and foreign, have been insistently providing for some time and which are even more valid because the countries that have adopted them have better resisted the wave of the Covid-19 crisis. The first concerns the necessary digital transformation and the second the intensification of intra-African trade. Digital technology - the pandemic has proved it - becomes a formidable aid in keeping citizens, institutions, health, industry and agriculture together. Kenya, Mozambique, Togo, Zambia, Namibia, Southern Africa and Ethiopia have boosted their digital assets by improving agriculture, education and healthcare in various ways.
As for intra-African trade, the World Bank has insisted on the need to fully implement the Zleca (African Continental Free Trade Area) as effective protection against crises originating from other continents. The report has in fact demonstrated that the improvement recorded in the facilitation of trade between the countries of East Africa has made it possible to cushion the 18,5 per cent fall in the second quarter of world trade. The reduction of customs barriers has allowed Kenya to develop trade so much as to exceed the threshold of their pre-crisis level with positive repercussions from an economic point of view.
