Francophone nation, Cote d’Ivoire, is repositioning itself for the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) with ongoing developmental projects and strategic investments aimed at building ready and skilled workforce across the trade and logistics value chain, including the teaching of trade-related courses in English.
According to Senior Regional Procurement Officer West and Central Africa for IFAD, and Chairperson of CILT-WiLAT Cote d’Ivoire, Ms. Carine Toure Yemita, the move will position Cote d-Ivoire to take advantage of the single continental market with its competitive and globally-oriented graduates or workforce.
“Capacity building is something everyone will need but especially in Africa, we need to improve the capacity levels of our people. Based on our strategy, we’re confident that the future will be better.
All our CILT courses are in English and the idea is to be very competitive; not only to think in silos or for the Francophone zone but to produce a competitive pool of students or workforce for the global market,” she told Single African Market in an interview.
She added: “To be more useful to the organization or to move beyond our comfort zone, we are thinking globally and ‘Africanly’.”
“As a nation, we want to developed and well-positioned to build the Africa we want and the AfCFTA is a very good instrument with the elimination of barriers and access to a population of over 1.3billion. Let’s not focus only on ECOWAS,” she added.
According to Ms. Yemita, the single continental market will take time to gel but party states will have to remain positive about it and provide the relevant assistance and technical support to make it operational.
She said Cote d’Ivoire is repositioning itself to leverage the single African market with a number of interventions including going digital with its Customs procedures, a system which will be launched next year.
“This will improve and fast-track Customs processes at all our entry points; this will reduce costs and save time as well eliminate avenues for corruption. This is the agenda that our government is taking involving the various stakeholders to make sure that we’re all moving in the same direction,” she said.
