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The narrative of a rising Africa
is being challenged.
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About 10 years ago,
I spoke about an Africa,
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an Africa of hope and opportunity,
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an Africa of entrepreneurs,
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an Africa very different from the Africa
that you normally hear about
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of death, poverty, and disease,
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and that what I spoke about,
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became part of what is known now
as the narrative of the rising Africa.
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I want to tell you two stories
about this rising Africa.
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The first has to do with Rwanda,
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a country that has gone
through many trials and tribulations.
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And Rwanda has decided to become
the technology hub, or a technology hub
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on the continent.
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It's a country with mountainous
and hilly terrain,
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a little bit like here,
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so it's very difficult
to deliver services to people.
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So what has Rwanda said?
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In order to save lives,
it's going to try using drones
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to deliver lifesaving drugs,
vaccines, and blood
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to people in hard-to-reach places
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in partnership with
a company called Zipline,
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with UPS, and also with the Gavi,
a global vaccine alliance.
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In doing this, it will save lives.
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This is part of the type of innovation
we want to see in the rising Africa.
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The second story has to do with something
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that I'm sure most of you
have seen or will remember.
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Very often, countries in Africa
suffer drought and floods,
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and it's getting more frequent
because of climate change effects.
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When this happens, they normally wait
for international appeals to raise money.
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You see pictures of children
with flies on their faces,
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carcasses of dead animals, and so on.
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Now these countries,
32 countries, came together
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under the auspices of the African Union
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and decided to form an organization
called the African Risk Capacity.
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What does it do?
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It's a weather-based insurance agency,
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and what these countries do
is to pay insurance each year,
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about 3 million dollars a year
of their own resources,
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so that in the event they have
a difficult drought situation or flood,
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this money will be paid out to them,
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which they can then use
to take care of their populations,
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instead of waiting for aid to come.
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The African Risk Capacity
last year paid 26 million dollars
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to Mauritania, Senegal, and Niger.
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This enabled them to take care
of 1.3 million people affected by drought.
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They were able to restore livelihoods,
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buy fodder for cattle,
feed children in school,
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and in short keep the populations home
instead of migrating out of the area.
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So these are the kinds of stories
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of an Africa ready
to take responsibility for itself,
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and to look for solutions
for its own problems.
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But that narrative is being challenged now
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because the continent has not
been doing well in the last two years.
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It had been growing
at five percent per annum
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for the last one and a half decades,
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but this year's forecast
was three percent. Why?
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In an uncertain global environment,
commodity prices have fallen.
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Many of the economies
are still commodity driven,
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and therefore their
performance has slipped.
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And now the issue of Brexit
doesn't make it any easier.
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I never knew that the Brexit could happen
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and that it could be one of the things
that would cause global uncertainty
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such as we have.
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So now we've got this situation,
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and I think it's time to take stock
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and to say what were the things
that the African countries did right?
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What did they do wrong?
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How do we build on all of this
and learn lessons
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so that we can keep Africa rising?
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So let me talk about six things
that I think we did right.
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The first is managing
our economies better.
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The '80s and '90s were the lost decades
when Africa was not doing well,
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and some of you will remember
an "Economist" cover
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that said, "The Lost Continent."
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But in the 2000s, policymakers learned
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that they needed to manage
the macroeconomic environment better,
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to ensure stability,
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keep inflation low in single digits,
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keep their fiscal deficits low,
below three percent of GDP,
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give investors, both domestic and foreign,
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some stability so they'll have confidence
to invest in these economies.
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So that was number one.
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Two, debt.
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In 1994, the debt-to-GDP ratio
of African countries was 130 percent,
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and they didn't have fiscal space.
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They couldn't use their resources
to invest in their development
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because they were paying debt.
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There may be some of you in this room
who worked to support African countries
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to get debt relief.
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So private creditors, multilaterals
and bilaterals came together
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and decided to do the Highly Indebted
Poor Countries Initiative
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and give debt relief.
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So this debt relief in 2005
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made the debt-to-GDP ratio
fall down to about 30 percent,
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and there was enough resources
to try and reinvest.
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The third thing was
loss-making enterprises.
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Governments were involved in business
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which they had no business being in.
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And they were running businesses,
they were making losses.
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So some of these enterprises
were restructured,
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commercialized, privatized, or closed,
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and they became
less of a burden on government.
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The fourth thing
was a very interesting thing.
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The telecoms revolution came,
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and African countries jumped on it.
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In 2000, we had 11 million phone lines.
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Today, we have about 687 million
mobile lines on the continent,
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and this has enabled us
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to go, move forward
with some mobile technology
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where Africa is actually leading.
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In Kenya, the development of mobile money,
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m-pesa, which all of you have heard about.
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Took some time for the world
to notice that Africa was ahead
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in this particular technology.
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And this mobile money
is also providing a platform
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for access to alternative energy.
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You know, people who can now pay for solar
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the same way they pay
for cards for their telephone.
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So this was a very good development,
something that went right.
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We also invested more
in education and health, not enough,
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but there were some improvements.
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250 million children were immunized
in the last one and a half decades.
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The other thing was
that conflicts decreased.
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There were many conflicts
on the continent.
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Many of you are aware of that.
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But they came down, and our leaders
even managed to dampen some coups.
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New types of conflicts have emerged,
and I'll refer to those later.
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So based on all this, there's also
some differentiation on the continent
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that I want you to know about,
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because even as
the doom and gloom is here,
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there are some countries --
Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Ethiopia,
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Tanzania, and Senegal are performing
relatively well at the moment.
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But what did we do wrong?
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Let me mention eight things.
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You have to have
more things wrong than right.
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(Laughter)
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So there are eight things we did wrong.
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The first was that even though we grew,
we didn't create enough jobs.
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We didn't create jobs for our youth.
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Youth unemployment on the continent
is about 15 percent,
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and underemployment is a serious problem.
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The second thing that we did is that
the quality of growth was not good enough.
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Even those jobs we created
were low-productivity jobs,
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so we moved people
from low-productivity agriculture
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to low-productivity commerce
and working in the informal sector
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in the urban areas.
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The third thing
is that inequality increased.
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So we created more billionaires.
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50 billionaires worth 96 billion dollars
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own more wealth than the bottom
75 million people on the continent.
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Poverty,
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the proportion of people in poverty --
that's the fourth thing -- did decrease,
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but the absolute numbers did not
because of population growth,
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and population growth is something
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that we don't have enough
of a dialogue about on the continent.
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And I think we will need
to get a handle on it,
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particularly how we educate girls.
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That is the road to really working
on this particular issue.
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The fifth thing is that we didn't invest
enough in infrastructure.
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We had investment from the Chinese.
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That helped some countries,
but it's not enough.
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The consumption of electricity
in Africa on the continent
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in Sub-Saharan Africa
is equivalent to Spain.
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The total consumption
is equivalent to that of Spain.
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So many people are living in the dark,
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and as the President of the African
Development Bank said recently,
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Africa cannot develop in the dark.
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The other thing we have not done
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is that our economies
retain the same structure
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that we've had for decades.
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So even though we've been growing,
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the structure of the economies
has not changed very much.
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We are still exporting commodities,
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and exporting commodities is what?
It's exporting jobs.
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Our manufacturing value-added
is only 11 percent.
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We are not creating enough
decent manufacturing jobs for our youth,
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and trade among ourselves is low.
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Only about 12 percent of our trade
is among ourselves.
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So that's another serious problem.
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Then governance.
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Governance is a serious issue.
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We have weak institutions,
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and sometimes nonexistent institutions,
and I think this gives way for corruption.
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Corruption is an issue that we have not
yet gotten a good enough handle on,
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and we have to fight tooth and nail,
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that and increased transparency
in the way we manage our economies
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and the way we manage our finances.
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We also need to be wary of new conflicts,
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new types of conflicts,
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such as we have with Boko Haram
in my country, Nigeria,
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and with Al-Shabaab in Kenya.
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We need to partner
with international partners,
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developed countries,
to fight this together.
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Otherwise, we create a new reality
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which is not the type
we want for a rising Africa.
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And finally, the issue of education.
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Our education systems
in many countries are broken.
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We are not creating the types of skills
needed for the future.
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So we have to find a way
to educate better.
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So those are the things
that we are not doing right.
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Now, where do we go from there?
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I believe that the way forward
is to learn to manage success.
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Very often, when people succeed
or countries succeed,
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they forget what made them succeed.
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Learning what you're successful at,
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managing it, and keeping it
is vital for us,
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so all those things I said we did right,
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we have to learn to do it right again,
keep doing it right.
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Managing the economy well,
creating stability is vital,
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getting prices right,
and policy consistency.
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Very often, we are not consistent.
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One regime goes out, another comes in
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and they throw away even the functioning
policies that were there before.
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What does this do?
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It creates uncertainty
for people, for households,
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uncertainties for business.
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They don't know whether and how to invest.
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Debt: we must manage
the success we had in reducing our debt,
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but now countries
are back to borrowing again,
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and we see our debt-to-GDP ratio
beginning to creep up,
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and in certain countries,
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debt is becoming a problem,
so we have to avoid that.
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So managing success.
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The next thing
is focusing with a laser beam
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on those things we did not do well.
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First and foremost is infrastructure.
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Yes, most countries now recognize
they have to invest in this,
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and they are trying to do
the best they can to do that.
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We must.
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The most important thing is power.
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You cannot develop in the dark.
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And then governance and corruption:
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we have to fight.
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We have to make our countries transparent.
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And above all, we have to
engage our young people.
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We have genius in our young people.
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I see it every day.
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It's what makes me wake up
in the morning and feel ready to go.
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We have to unleash
the genius of our young people,
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get out of their way,
support them to create and innovate
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and lead the way.
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And I know that they will lead us
in the right direction.
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And our women, and our girls:
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we have to recognize
that girls and women are a gift.
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They have strength,
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and we have to unleash that strength
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so that they can
contribute to the continent.
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I strongly believe
that when we do all of these things,
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we find that the rising Africa narrative
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is not a fluke.
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It's a trend.
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It's a trend, and if we continue,
if we unleash our youth,
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if we unleash our women,
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we may step backwards sometimes,
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we may even step sideways,
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but the trend is clear.
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Africa will continue to rise.
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And I tell you businesspeople
in the audience,
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investment in Africa is not for today,
is not for tomorrow,
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it's not a short-term thing,
it's a longer term thing.
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But if you are not invested in Africa,
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then you will be missing
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one of the most important
emerging opportunities in the world.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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Moderator: So you mentioned
corruption in your talk,
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and you're known, well-known
as a strong anticorruption fighter.
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But that's had consequences.
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People have fought back,
and your mother was kidnapped.
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How have you been handling this?
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Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala:
It's been very difficult.
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Thank you for mentioning
the issue of the kidnap of my mother.
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It's a very difficult subject.
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But what it means
is that when you fight corruption,
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when you touch the pockets
of people who are stealing money,
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they don't just keep quiet.
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They fight back, and the issue for you
is when they try to intimidate you,
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do you give up, or do you fight on?
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Do you find a way
to stay on and fight back?
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And the answer that I had
with the teams I worked with
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is we have to fight on.
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We have to create those institutions.
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We have to find ways to stop these people
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from taking away
the heritage of the future.
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And so that's what we did.
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And even out of government,
we continued to make that point.
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In our countries, nobody,
nobody is going to fight corruption
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for us but us.
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And therefore,
that comes with consequences,
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and we just have to do the best we can.
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But I thank you and thank TED
for giving us a voice
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to say to those people, you will not win,
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and we will not be intimidated.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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Moderator: Thank you so much
for your great talk and important work.
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(Applause)