Africa: The Next Investment Hub

Former economic Minister to Nelson Mandela and Oxford University Professor, Ian Goldin, has identified investment affirmed Africa as the new investment hotspot.

Goldin said this ahead of the Africa Hotel Investment Forum (AHIF) which will take place on September 25-26, this year in Nairobi, Kenya; where he will be describing Africa’s economic outlook in the next decade.

Goldin gave a promising picture of Africa’s outlook from now till 2020.  He predicts that during this period, Africa will:

• Be the fastest growing continent.
• Experience the most rapid growth in the consumption of consumer goods.
• Be the greatest improvements in investment climate.
• Be More populated than Europe (Double).
• Have the world’s youngest labour force and in the following decades its size will overtake China’s and India’s.
• Experience reduction in Inequality while in the rest of the world it will increase.

He posits that,“Africa is now the fastest-growing technology market in the world and new IT businesses are appearing at such a rate that there are stories about a shortage of suitable office accommodation in Nairobi, which is the centre of the emerging IT industry.”
 

“The changes taking place in Africa are truly dramatic. For example, in the early 1980s, over 30 countries were ruled by autocrats and there were few democracies; by the late 1990s, that statistic was reversed. In the period 1999 – 2009, the S&P 500 fell by 0.8% year on year however; by comparison, the S&P Africa grew by over 23%, " Goldin affirms.