Looking at Africa 40 Years from Now Protocols
Speech Delivered by Dr Akinwumi A. Adesina, President of the African
Development Bank Group, at the 2017 Emerging Markets Forum, Abidjan,
Looking at Africa 40 Years from Now
Protocols
1. Thank you very much for inviting me to speak at this Emerging Markets
Forum. Congratulations to you Harinder and your team and the Government
of Côte d'Ivoire for organizing the event.
2. I've been asked this afternoon to reflect on "Imagining Africa 40 years from
now". Lunch is tough to compete against, for you’ve all worked so hard and
deserve your sumptuous lunch. So, I will be brief.
3. Did you say forty years? That's a tough one. I’m looking around the room, and
what I see leads me to conclude that quite a few of us won’t be here in 40
years’ time. The only ones likely to be here and active in that time span will
be today’s children and young people. So maybe this act of imagination
should come from somebody under 30 at most.
4. Some 40 years from now, the world will be totally different. We will have
driverless flying cars; we will have Uber in our fingers, YouTube in our eyes
and Google on our apparels. Healthcare will be done only via mobile hospital
drones packed with precision needles. Robots in the factories will go on strike,
and maybe “everything we do and say will be in the pill we took today”.
5. I don’t know – I won’t be there.
6. Forty years from now is too far off for me to contemplate; but instead of
stopping right here and sitting down again, I’m going to offer you what
makes sense to me as a time line. And then I’m going to talk about that.
7. The future of Africa keeps getting postponed. It used to be 2020, now it's
2063. Then we are asked to imagine it by 2067. But I’m going to talk about
Africa’s promise to transform itself within the next ten years, the span of the
High 5s.
8. And it’s ten years not just because, by God's grace I am more likely to live to
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