President Akufo-Addo has urged AU member states and fellow heads of state to support the implementation of an Africa-wide mobile telephony interoperability system.
Speaking at the 37th Ordinary Session of the AU’s Assembly of Heads of State on Sunday, February 18, 2024, President Akufo-Addo called for the adoption of the 2024 Africa Prosperity Dialogues (APD 2024) Compact Document. He specifically emphasized the need for a continental interoperability network across all member states.
President Akufo-Addo highlighted that such a system would significantly boost Africa’s efforts in establishing the world’s largest single market through the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). It would enable tens of millions of Africans to conduct cross-border trade in goods and services using their local currencies.
During his address at the Nelson Mandela Plenary Hall at the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa, President Akufo-Addo emphasized that Africa’s ambition to create the world’s largest single market under AfCFTA would greatly benefit from a “collective, aggressive embrace of the digital economy and its available tools.”
He said, “At the end of last month’s three-day Africa Prosperity Dialogues (APD) 2024, which I was happy to host at the Peduase Presidential Lodge in Aburi, Ghana, the participants signed up to the Peduase Compact, a document I am informed has been widely distributed here at this Summit.
“Allow me to focus on one very transformative and, at the same time, very doable item in the Compact, which if implemented can truly and meaningfully fast-track the inclusive realisation of the AfCFTA. This is the introduction of an Africa-wide mobile telephony interoperability,” President Akufo-Addo said.
“The participants at this year’s Africa Prosperity Dialogues were unanimous in agreeing that enabling interoperability to have a single pan-African payment system is the easiest, quickest, and most effective way to accelerate and deepen the single market project in Africa. It is a low-hanging fruit way of making AfCFTA immediately meaningful to tens of millions of people across Africa”, President Akufo-Addo further remarked.
Citing statistics to back his call, President Akufo-Addo indicated that “figures provided at the Dialogues by the AFDB and backed by the GSM Association indicate that almost half of all Africans have a sim card, 28% are accessing the internet, and we saw a whopping US$832 billion worth of mobile money transactions in sub-Saharan Africa in 2022 alone.”
“Imagine where this [$832bn] figure will be with a common interoperability system working across all member states. Imagine for a moment a world where a market trader in Johannesburg can easily and securely send money to her family in Dakar, without the need for cumbersome currency exchanges or risky cash transfers,” President Akufo-Addo suggested.
Additionally, the implementation of interoperability across the 55 African states is expected to eliminate or significantly reduce roaming charges within the continent, similar to the situation in the European Union.
The annual Africa Prosperity Dialogues (APD) is the flagship event of the Africa Prosperity Network (APN). It is a three-day retreat held in the eastern hills of Ghana, bringing together Africa’s business, political, and institutional leaders to discuss and make actionable decisions on implementing Africa’s single market project. This project is seen as a crucial pathway to achieve shared, sustainable prosperity for Africa’s 1.4 billion citizens.
The 2024 event took place from January 25 to 27 at the Peduase Presidential Lodge in the Aburi Hills, Eastern Region of Ghana. Over one thousand participants, including presidents, prime ministers, ministers, high-level government officials from across Africa, thought leaders, CEOs, and heads of national and multinational institutions, attended the retreat.
The Peduase Compact, a key outcome of the event, called for African countries to allow free visa access for Africans traveling to other African states, among other initiatives.