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Africa’s Path to Growth: Sector by Sector

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Africa’s path to growth: Sector by sector

The continent’s growth story isn’t entirely about the extractive industries. Seven articles examine the future of a wide range of sectors.
Although Africa’s growth prospects are bright, they differ not only country by country but also sector by sector. In these articles, we examine the possibilities for seven of them: agriculture, banking, consumer goods, infrastructure, mining, oil and gas, and telecommunications. Perhaps the most fundamental point is that Africa’s growth story is hardly limited to the extractive industries. As many as 200 million Africans will enter the consumer goods market by 2015. Banking and telecommunications are growing rapidly too, and infrastructure expenditures are rising significantly faster in Africa than in the world as a whole. Not that the growth of the extractive industries won’t be impressive. The continent has more than one-quarter of the world’s arable land. Eleven of its countries rank among the top ten sources for at least one major mineral. Africa will produce 13 percent of global oil by 2015, up from 9 percent in 1998. For many companies, this is a future worth investing in.

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Africa’s path to growth: Sector by sector

Agriculture: Abundant opportunities
Kartik Jayaram, Jens Riese, and Sunil Sanghvi Agriculture is Africa’s largest economic sector, representing 15 percent of the continent’s total GDP, or more than $100 billion annually. It is highly concentrated, with Egypt and Nigeria alone accounting for one-third of total agricultural output and the top ten countries generating 75 percent. Africa’s agro-ecological potential is massively larger than its current output, however—and so are its food requirements. While more than one-quarter of the world’s arable land lies in this continent, it generates only 10 percent of global agricultural output. So there is huge

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