The President of the African Export-Import Bank , Prof. Okey Oramah has disclosed that the bank is putting in place a financing facility of $2 billion to assist African countries in the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines, which would be available in the continent in March.
He said: “We should be patient. The AfCFTA implementation will come with challenges. But we should not be daunted with the challenges. We should expect and approach them with a positive spirit to find solutions. I will want every Africa and the Small and Medium Enterprises not to dwell in complaints but to try to find solutions.”
Africans, according to him, hardly see an African country as a market but looked to very far land for trades. “Ethiopia imports certain types of leather for its shoe industry. The same kind of leather it imports at a very high cost is exported by Burundi to the outside world. Look at the technical statistics for specified rubber. Ivory Coast exports this in abundance to many parts of the world but Nigeria imports the same thing from Asia,” he said.