Africans must own logistics, shipping space — McDan
The Executive Chairman of McDan Group, a logistics conglomerate, Dr Daniel Mckorley, has called on Africans to counter the foreign dominance in logistics by owning and leading the logistics and shipping space.
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He said that was one of the surest ways to aid intra-African trade and deal with the challenges that most African firms faced when it came to moving goods in the region.
“The practice where products and goods from the region have to be first shipped outside the region and brought back has to stop. It is not fair that when I produce in Africa, the product has to go to Europe before coming to a country like Senegal; that is not fair and it has to change,” he said.
Furthermore, Dr Mckorley said: “The cycle increases his cost as a producer and someone in the logistics space”. “Whoever controls the sea controls the business, and if we don’t have connectivity in Africa that becomes a big challenge for all of us,” he stated.
He therefore appealed to financial institutions and the government to consider his call.
Meeting
Dr Mckorley said this at the African Export-Import Bank (AFREXIM Bank) Annual Meeting held in Bahamas. The event brought together banking chiefs, CEOs of some multinational groups, entrepreneurs, financial analysts, policymakers, corporate leaders, bankers and academia, among others, to discuss strategies to advance trade and investment between the Caribbean, Africa and the wider diaspora.
Dr Mckorley highlighted how platforms such as the Africa Trade Gateway had helped in making payments in his local currency across the continent easy, stressing that if a platform such as AFREXIM Bank Annual Meeting was given the necessary support, a lot of African businesses would scale up production and services.
“The African Free Trade Area deal, or call it AfCFTA, has helped me a lot in terms of doing business in Africa and we need more of these,” Dr Mckorley said.
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Africa Trade Gateway
The Africa Trade Gateway is a dynamic digital trade ecosystem for commercial banks and their trading platforms. It is one of the initiatives put together by the AFREXIM Bank to aid trade in the region.
It offers what can be described as a B2B marketplace for customers to transact more and generate more income.
AFREXIM Bank
African Export-Import Bank is a Pan-African multilateral financial institution mandated to finance and promote intra and extra African trade. For 30 years, the Bank has been deploying innovative structures to deliver financing solutions that support the transformation of the structure of Africa’s trade, accelerating industrialisation and intra-regional trade, thereby boosting economic expansion in Africa.