The African Development Bank (AfDB) has called for stronger ties between Africa and European countries in a bid to boost trade between the two regions.

Stefan Nalletamby, the Bank’s Acting Vice-President for Infrastructure, Private Sector and Regional Integration, highlighted the importance of such a relationship, noting that it would result in more equitable benefits.

Nalletamby was speaking during the European Development Days held on June 15 and 16, 2016 in Brussels, Belgium. Participating in a panel on Development and Trade Links and the Agenda 2030, Nalletamby emphasised the need to employ a different strategy in order to realise maximum profits from the EU/Africa relationship. “We need to rethink the way we do business. We must have a comprehensive approach which combines hard and soft infrastructure,” he said, pointing out the importance of enhancing intra-African trade.

Other panelists were Cecilia Malmström, the EU Trade Commissioner, and Arancha Gonzalez, the International Trade Centre Executive Director.

The Bank was also represented in other sessions, including a forum on Achieving the SDGs: how can we make business more social? Emanuele Santi, a Lead Strategy Advisor at the AfDB, spoke on the need for the global community to move beyond the often fragmented programs to support enterpreneurship and esnure greater synergy among their interventions. “If we are serious about enterprenership and building local ecosystems, we as the development community need to start behaving like an ecosystem.”

Santi referred to the Bank’s experience of rallying 20 partners from private sector, local banking system and donors in Tunisia, under the Souk At-tanmia program. He also cited the Bank’s Jobs for Youth in Africa Strategy, which seeks to create 25 million jobs by equipping young people with skills to help them realise their full potential.

The strategy will see the Bank join forces with the European Investment Bank to support new innovative ventures in a synergic manner. The two institutions will complement each other, deploy interventions, combine equity investments and venture capital funds, as well as offer support to incubation and to ecosystem building.

The European Development Days is the European Commission’s annual gathering, which brings the development community together to share ideas and best practices in the field of development.

The Bank was also represented at the Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All) Advisory Board meeting hosted by the EU Commissioner for International Cooperation and Development, Neven Mimica. Nalletamby attended the event on behalf of AfDB President Akinwumi Adesina. It was co-chaired by the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon and the President of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim. The meeting brought together leaders from governments, international organisations, the private sector and civil society.

The meeting saw the new CEO of SE4All, Rachel Kyte, present the draft Strategic Framework for Results 2016-2021 for SE4All in the context of the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 on energy and the Paris Agreement.

Nalletamby welcomed the focus of the Strategic Framework on front-loading the energy access target, which he said is aligned with the Bank’s New Deal on Energy for Africa. The initiative seeks to provide universal energy access in Africa by 2025.

He further highlighted the Bank’s leadership on SE4All as host of the SE4All Africa Hub. He called upon partners to support African countries with the implementation of their SE4All Action Agendas, and as well as their national implementation framework for SDG 7.

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The Development & Trade link and the Agenda 2030

Leveraging the developmental impact of market forces through international cooperation

The 2030 Global Agenda for Sustainable Development is not only a development challenge – it also presents a huge business opportunity. With more than 800 million people in the world lacking access to clean water, around 1 billion lacking access to health services and more than a billion lacking access to electricity, there is a big role for the private sector to play.

In a snap poll carried out during the session on what factor plays the biggest part in generating sustainable development and growth in developing countries, nearly 54% of respondents said that the factor was private-sector investment, with trade following a distant second at 22%. Official Development Assistance (ODA) was seen as having only a very small impact.

But for the private sector to play its part in meeting international development objectives, investment is needed in areas such as infrastructure in poorer developing countries, notably in Africa. This investment is needed both in the area of hard infrastructure, such as roads or energy supply, and in so-called soft infrastructure, notably education.

In Africa, for example, there is a need for education reform because there are too many young people leaving higher education without the skills that the private sector is looking for. This generates huge frustration on the part of the young, because there are insufficient jobs in the public sector to absorb them all.

Trade can generate growth and development, but in order to do so it must be both inclusive and sustainable. Consumers in developed countries increasingly demand to know more about what they are consuming and how it is produced. One of the first prerequisites for trade growth is the lowering of barriers to trade. But there is no need for any accompanying lowering of labour or other standards to boost competitive advantage. Companies must seek to add value to their products and this requires innovation through investment in quality and good branding, the session heard.

But it is a mistake for developing countries to focus too much on export markets to the detriment of building up their local markets. It is also a mistake for them to rely too heavily on exporting goods to developed countries rather than seeking to expand their markets in neighbouring developing countries. In this regard, it is important that trade deals with developing countries in Africa and elsewhere that are forged by individual developed countries and blocs of developed countries, such as the European Union, do not undermine attempts to build strong regional markets.

Finally, there had been a tendency in the past to adopt a silo approach towards development, with issues categorised as belonging to individual sectors such as trade, employment or the environment. What is now needed, participants stressed, is a more holistic approach bringing together the various strands into a more coherent strategy.

Aid for Trade from developed countries needs to focus more on stimulating private investment and to move away from the more traditional forms of development assistance.

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals: How can we make business more social?

Accelerating and scaling social enterprise solutions

What exactly is a social enterprise? Is it a sector in itself? If so, does a social enterprise model exist? A social enterprise, or business, is probably best described as one that is not profit driven, but rather seeks to maximise social and environmental benefits while using any profits to build a sustainable model.

Tebita Ambulance in Ethiopia is an excellent example of a successful social enterprise. It was set up by Kibret Abebe Tuffa, a hospital nurse who was concerned at figures that showed a mere 4 % of road accident victims in Ethiopia were transported to hospital by ambulance – the rest are taken by car or taxi with no life-saving facilities.

After selling his home to raise finance, Tuffa subsequently launched the country’s first – and still only – private ambulance service which, since its launch, has transported some 40,000 patients to hospital. From humble beginnings, it now has a fleet of 11 ambulances and has created jobs.

The social enterprise has been successful despite a lack of access to finance and technical assistance. This is just one of the issues that need to be addressed to help support fledgling social enterprises.

The ambulance service is a reminder that social enterprises provide a route beyond aid and grant-giving to tackle problems. Because social enterprises generate their own revenue and are not aid dependent, supporting their growth provides deep and lasting development benefits. They are real businesses, employing people and contributing to growth and often showing higher innovation than mainstream businesses. This is why a number of governments, donors and aid agencies are incorporating social enterprise approaches in their development plans.

The British Council, with 80 years’ of experience, has a social enterprise programme, which it hopes can inject some much-needed trust in economic systems as well as generating social and economic value.

For the international development community there are two fundamental issues which necessities a focus on social enterprise.

First, it is wrong to rely on aid alone to achieve the ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. Global gross domestic product in 2015 was approximately US$74 trillion. The total value of donor aid, corporate responsibility and even impact investment was only US$160 billion.

Second, the pursuit of economic growth is often causing or exacerbating social or environmental issues. That is why the international community must become more sophisticated in the type of economic growth it needs and how it can use donor funding to leverage more inclusive and environmentally responsible business.

Like the British Council, the World Bank and the African Development Bank are other bodies doing invaluable work in this area, not only via funding but in helping to mainstream social enterprises. This is an objective also being pursued by the European Commission, although it says there is currently a lack of reliable data available on the effectiveness of national government support for social enterprises.

The SDGs want to support a fundamentally more social economy by 2030, but more is needed to meet their ambitious objectives and, at the same time, boost social entrepreneurship. It is all about removing barriers to doing business and creating an ecosystem where a more social economy can and does flourish.