The Collective Impact Forum describes collective impact as bringing people together in a structured way to achieve social change. As Shared Value advocates and practitioners, we believe that these “people” include business, society and governments, and we need to work together to bring about prosperity for all

The world is facing many challenges and it is my personal view that the challenges we particularly face in Africa are exacerbated by those outside of the continent. We were just coming up for breath after the COVID-19 pandemic, and then the Ukraine-Russia crisis erupted, setting back our promising economic recovery.

According to the Africa Development Bank’s African Economic Outlook 2022 report, like the rest of the world, Africa risks slow growth and high inflation. According to a recent World Economic Forum article, global growth is expected to slump from 5.7% in 2021 to 2.9% in 2022 – significantly lower than the 4.1% that was anticipated in January.

“The war in Ukraine, lockdowns in China, supply-chain disruptions, and the risk of stagflation are hammering growth. For many countries, recession will be hard to avoid,” said World Bank President, David Malpass.

To add to our challenges in Africa, we are the least climate-resilient region in the world. According to the Africa Development Bank, Africa has some of the lowest per-capita climate finance inflows in the world and that this is not in line with the belief that Africa is owed 10 times the global climate finance it received from 2016 to 2019.

Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, President of the African Development Bank, motivates that Africa can emerge stronger from the pandemic, the Ukraine-Russia conflict and climate change, if bilateral and multilateral development partners, private sector and African governments work together.

So where to from here? Is all this this then not an opportunity for us as Africans to look at how we can create collective impact, intentionally work together, and share information for the purpose of solving some of the complex problems on our continent. The theory of collective impact is that, to solve complex problems, we have to work together.

There is no silver bullet or singular model for success. It takes investment, commitment, willingness and collaboration to create collective impact. It is for these reasons and many more that the Africa Shared Value Leadership Summit will join forces with Mobile World Congress Africa in October 2022, at the Kigali Convention Centre in Rwanda.

We will be convening a collective of leadership from the Shared Value and ICT communities across our continent, with the purpose of finding solutions for Africa’s connectivity and digital transformation challenges. Every business relies on connectivity and information to support operations and business growth. Furthermore, a more digitally transformed and inclusive environment based on creating shared value will enable innovation for solutions that address the challenges we face across the continent.

I strongly believe that if the African people have access to affordable, reliable and easily accessible connectivity to facilitate access to information to  empower our people to make more informed decisions about their future and help the growth of the Africa economy.

Please do join us in Kigali in October 2022 and let’s create opportunities to collaborate and together create collective impact. 

TIEKIE BARNARD
 Founder & CEO