African countries should take advantage of opportunities to leap frog to positions of economic growth, by following the examples of East Asian countries, which, over the past decade, placed great emphasis on education and technology development, a report released on Tuesday urges.

Delivering the findings of his report, entitled ‘Challenges of African growth: opportunities, constraints and strategic directions’, Benno Ndulu said that, as late starters, African countries had the possibility of accelerating the pace of economic progress by taking advantage of information-based technology opportunities to enhance productivity and competitiveness and learn lessons from successful growth experiences.

Africa could take a regional approach to the management, use and coordination of cross-border infrastructure investment, such as power-pooling in southern Africa, which minimised cost and mitigated risk.

As an example, Ndulu highlighted cross-country pipelines in West Africa, which benefited a number of countries.

“Promote public-private partnerships – combine public investment in infrastructure assets and operational efficiency of private management,” he urged.

“
nnovation is key for productivity, growth and competitiveness.” Ndulu noted that investment in information communication technology and higher education had boosted economic growth in countries, such as India, Korea and Singapore.

He pointed out that South Africa was a growth catalyst and that it was increasingly playing a role beyond Southern Africa.

South Africa was investing heavily in regional connectivity, transport, air travel and telecommunications, as well as investing in financial infrastructure and banking information flow, such as DStv covering real-time events.

“Through risk mitigation, South African firms are underwriting risk for investing in Africa,” he said.

Ndulu was hopeful of increasing African growth, saying that two-thirds of countries on the continent had already had multiparty elections and could build on recent growth performance.

In 2005, 17 countries in sub-Saharan Africa were growing at an average rate exceeding 5% annually, while several others had shown themselves capable of short spurts of high growth.