African Economic Conference: AfDB Calls for Research Papers

The African Development Bank has called for research and policy papers on the theme, ‘The Imperatives for Sustainable Industrial Development in Africa‘ ahead of the 2023 African Economic Conference.

This year’s event is jointly organised by the African Development Bank, the Economic Commission for Africa, and the United Nations Development Programme in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from 16 to 18  November 2023.

According to a notice published on the AfDB website, the 2023 theme has four sub-themes namely:

1. Industrialisation and Global Value Chains integration in Africa: creating regional and linking them into global value chains; how to use special economic zones to promote regional value chains; value addition initiatves and manufacturing; leveraging and upscaling innovative technology; conducive environment and industrial policy; right skilling; boosting intra-African trade and investment;
2. Sustainable industrialisation as the new frontier: fostering industrialization that mitigates the impacts of climate change and habitat destruction and promtes efficient use of natural resources; creation of green supply chains for green industry through tackling waste, minimizing emissions, and using renewable energy;
3. AfCTA and Africa’s Industrialisation – how to develop regional and sub-regional value chains (S/RVCs), and link them into global value chains; leveraging comparative advantage to spur diversification; sorting the tariff challenges to promote S/RVCs; supporting regional integration supporting infrastructure for industrialization; ameliorating production and transaction costs cause by poor and inadequate regional infrastructure services (energy, roads, telecommunications, etc.); spuring movement of resources – financial, human and production materials and services.
4. Financing Africa’s industrialisation – To ensure inslcusiveness how to tackle the financinang challenges of Africa’s small and medium sized industries to bolster sustainable industrial development;  how to mobilize finance resources for medium to long-term financing needs of industrialization; mitigating risk perceptions that feed the African premium practice; harnessing Africa’s biodiversity to leverage green finances; pluging the gaps in the international financial architecture to increase Africa’s access to emerging finance instruments; growing Africa’s domestic capital markets;Policy-oriented research papers that are linked to the overall theme of AEC2023 are particularly welcomed.S

The organisers further adviced interested authors to submit their papers to a designated email eca-aec2023@un.org by 31 August 2023.