LAGOS,
Nigeria — U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and a slew of
American business executives are meeting in Nigeria to encourage trade
they say will create jobs on both continents.
The
visit to Nigeria, expected to be among the top 10 economies in the
world by 2050, and one of Africa's smallest but most innovative nations,
Rwanda, is designed to transform the perception of Africa from an
aid-dependent continent to a region brimming with business
opportunities, Pritzker told The Associated Press in an interview.
She
said Africa has seven of the fastest 10
growing economies in the world;
a burgeoning young population and a rising middle class (50 million in
Nigeria alone).
"So the message to Americans is now is the time to come and explore the opportunity in Africa," Pritzker said.
She
announced Tuesday that the second US-Africa Business Forum will take
place on the margins of the U.N. General Assembly in September because
many African leaders will be present. It will gather "hundreds of both
American and African business figures who want to get together because
they see the potential of doing more business in Africa," Pritzker said
of the event co-hosted by her department and Bloomberg Philanthropies.
President Barack Obama announced an expanded Power Africa initiative at
the first forum in Washington D.C. in 2014.
The
figures for Nigeria tell the story: In 2014, U.S. exports to Nigeria
topped $5.9 billion and imports from Nigeria totaled $3.8 billion,
compared to U.S. aid of $694 million last year.
The
latest U.S push comes as Nigeria is hurting from the downturn in the
economy of China, which last year overtook the U.S. to become Nigeria's
biggest trading partner. China accounted for 22.5 percent of Nigeria's
imports in the third quarter of 2015, compared to 9.6 percent from the
U.S., according to Nigeria's National Bureau of Statistics.
Nigeria's
current economic woes, including lower prices for oil that produces 80
percent of government revenue and a related slump in the naira currency,
are positives for investors, said General Electric's Jay Ireland, who
runs the U.S. multinational's Africa operations.
"This
is the time to come in," he said, adding American companies should be
looking at long-term investments that ride out the cycles of oil prices
and currency exchanges. "We're going to be here for a long time and feel
very comfortable investing in Nigeria. ... (It) provides a tremendous
platform for growth."
GE
is investing $200 million in Nigeria to build two facilities to
assemble oil and gas and power generation equipment that the company
hopes to export to other West African nations. The company employs
nearly 500 people in Nigeria.
U.S.
businesswoman Rahama Wright's firm partners with some 1,200 women from
two cooperatives in Ghana to produce shea butter beauty products sold in
the United States.
"We're
adding value by helping these women process the shea into a product, we
then connect that product to the U.S. marketplace in a way that allows
women to generate sustainable living wages and gives them a chance to be
financially independent, simply by connecting the dots," Wright, a
former Peace Corps worker, told AP.
Shea
butter used in beauty products is among items given liberal trade
access to the U.S. market under the African Growth and Opportunity Act
that Obama recently extended to 2025 to encourage Africans to build free
markets and open their economies.
Wright
said the biggest challenge she's encountered is the power blackouts
that bedevil many African enterprises. Last year, she got a local
utility company to extend a power line to their factory in northern
Ghana, bringing both electricity and water to villagers. She said it
brought home to her the importance of Obama's Power Africa initiative.
She
emphasized the importance of including the massive African diaspora
among stakeholders, people like herself, who grew up outside Syracuse
but whose mother is from northern Ghana. "I really do believe that that
is the secret sauce, one of the things that really will be part of that
turning point" building Africa out of poverty and into prosperity.
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