MTN Group CEO Ralph Mupita to speak at “Africa Prosperity Dialogues”

The global business leader and group chief executive officer of MTN, Africa’s largest mobile telecommunications giant, Ralph Mupita, will be speaking at the maiden Africa Prosperity Dialogues later this month in the Eastern Region of Ghana. The dialogues are organised by the Africa Prosperity Network and partners, including the African Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat and the Government of Ghana, the host nation.

Popularly dubbed the Kwahu Summit, the first of this annual series of dialogues will take place from 26 to 28 January 2023.

Focusing on intra-African trade, the Africa Prosperity Dialogues will bring together Africa’s political and business leaders to plan and work together on that all-important single market – the Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) project for the continent.

Watershed summit

Confirming his participation via video message, Ralph Mupita said he was excited that a platform has been created to engage Africa’s private sector properly in the process of Africa’s economic integration.

MTN provides voice, data, fintech, digital, enterprise, wholesale and API services to more than 285 million customers in 19 markets across the continent. Digitalisation is seen as one of the fastest ways to achieve economic integration in Africa, the continent with the highest per capita use of mobile money for transactions.

The MTN group chief executive said that the whole world is in a critical state and the African continent cannot afford to leave its destiny in the hands of the West or any other part of the world, as has been the case for so long.

Mupita argued that the Africa Prosperity Dialogues promise to be a watershed moment for the African continent because they seek to bring business and political leaders as well as policymakers and civil society organisations together at a single sitting, to map out strategies to fast-track the development of the African continent.

“I think we are living in very interesting times and part of what we are picking up is the concept of a great reset. We are living in a geopolitical, socio-economic environment that we would not have imagined maybe even six months ago, let alone a year ago, and so this is a time for us to reflect and say, ‘How do we create the Africa that we want, the Africa that our forefathers wanted?’

“The African Union came into being motivated by building an Africa that is self-sufficient but is at the same time integrated with the rest of the world. The power and strength of Africa lie in the enormous human potential that is in all of the countries that make up the continent, the enormous resource, the mineral wealth and the talents of the people. We have to be purposeful in how we think about the next five to ten years and what can be achieved,” Mupita said.

Africa Prosperity Dialogues

The Africa Prosperity Dialogues are symbolically dubbed the Kwahu Summit because the Kwahus of Ghana, the host nation, represent entrepreneurship and trade and are known to support each other to excel in business.

Kwahuman is also the highest elevated habitable territory in Ghana. The organisers of the Africa Prosperity Dialogues aim to support, through enhanced intra-African trade, the elevation of Africa and her peoples to the highest summit of human living, dignity and prosperity.

“The [summit], I think, has the potential to be a watershed summit. If we have business, government, civil society, policymakers committing to a path of action, that will empower us to self-determine our own future as continent,” Mupita said.

“The reality is that this continent has enormous potential and the potential just needs to be realised and it takes leadership, it takes belief and the desire for us as the people of the continent to say we want to move and progress, using the might and the strength of the resources that we have and, most importantly, the people that we have,” he said.

The 2023 Africa Prosperity Dialogues are the first of an annual series. They are being organised by the Africa Prosperity Network (APN) and partners including the Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Secretariat, located in Ghana, the Office of the President of the Republic of Ghana (the host nation for the AfCFTA Secretariat), the United Nations Development Programme (Africa), the Africa Prosperity Fund, Ghana Investment Promotion Centre (GIPC), the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and the Africa-America Institute.

Action on AfCFTA

The Africa Properity Dialogues are a pan-African economic platform bringing together the great minds and might of Africa, in Africa and in the diaspora, to think, plan and work together to expedite implementation of agreed initiatives within the AfCFTA.

The dialogues will also help shape the Africa Agenda for Action.

The summit will bring into practical focus the continent’s critical challenges and industrialisation priorities and advance aggressively the commercial and infrastructural interventions to achieve the vision of creating the largest single market in the world, of approximately 1.4 billion Africans.

Summit venues

The core dialogues gathering business and policy leaders (26 and 27 January) will take place at the Safari Valley Resort in Adukrom in the Akuapem Mountains.

On 28 January, the Peduase Presidential Lodge in Aburi, also in the Akuapem Mountains, will host the presidential and business executives’ dialogues.

Wilberforce Asare

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