Business
Lagos Business School to host Africa Business Conference
The theme of for this year’s conference is “Breeding African Lions: Imperatives for building globally competitive businesses“.
(Sponsor Wire) – Until the late 1990s, Africa was considered a remote and dark continent fraught with unemployment, poverty, armed conflicts amongst other ills.
These, several analysts pointed out were indices of the unbridled and corrupt leadership manifest in all tiers of government across the continent. For decades, the continent’s struggle for her economic emancipation have borne little or no fruit as most efforts were hampered by the selfish interests of the ruling political class. As a result, after difficult years of struggling to make an impact on the global scene, Africa is still reached out to with the proverbial long spoon of caution.
However, over the past decade, the changing fortunes of the “world’s poorest continent” has become a theme of magazine covers, investment conferences and a recent summit of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) emerging economies.
A steadily growing economy has made a big difference.
Over the past ten years real income per person has increased by more than 30 percent, whereas in the previous 20 years it shrank by nearly 10 percent. Africa is currently the world’s fastest-growing continent.
Over the next decade its gross domestic product (GDP) is expected to rise by an average of 6 percent a year, fueled largely by increasing foreign direct investment (FDI).
FDI has gone from US$15 billion in 2002 to US$37 billion in 2006 and US$46 billion in 2012.
