A key challenge to unlocking the potential of the African continent is the existence, access to, and efficiency of economic-enabling ‘hard’ infrastructure and associated services. While politicians and policymakers focus on the ‘necessary-but-not-sufficient’ and relatively ‘easy-to-address’ (on paper) issues such as tariffs, regulations, protocols etc, the real world of energy, connectivity, logistics and physical movement of goods needs even more attention and investment. While digitalisation and servicification of trade are key drivers of logistics developments, in the end, physical goods still need to reach a customer, containers still need to move through a port. The pandemic highlighted a fundamental truth – that the ‘old-world’ physical logistics will still make or break economies. Africa’s leaders need to focus on harnessing private-sector funding and capabilities to ensure the citizens of Africa have access to these required basic services to uplift lives, while at the same time allowing for participation in the global marketplace in an efficient, expedient and cost-effective way. While an individual company can be as productive and innovative as it wants, as long as the country, regional and continental shared infrastructure underperform, it disadvantages all economic players in Africa. My plea – don’t let economic-enabling physical infrastructure and related performance be the reason we cannot be globally competitive.
