“How To Let The World Know African Youths Are A Very Important Part Of The Present & Future” – WTO Boss Okonjo – Iweala

The Director-General of the World Trade Organization (W.T.O) Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has made a very high value revelation.

The former coordinating minister of Economy in the administration of former President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan has revealed how to make the world know that Africa and its youths are not just a vital part of the present but a very important part of the future societynow.ng confirms.

The 66year old economist who made history as the first female Director General at the World Trade Organization who spoke at the 2021 edition of the UBA Africa Conversations asserted that “Our youth is what we have (in Africa), youth is gold to us. If we can mobilize our youths productively to try recover from this pandemic.”

The Covid-19 pandemic created a whirlwind of crisis that has created a mess of the world and sharply altered daily livings across the globe with economies across continents taking massive hits.

As the world struggle to gets its bearing in the wake of the crisis, Okonjo-Iweala at the event organized by UBA Plc, a leading Pan-African financial institution offering banking services to more than twenty-five million customers insists that Africa and its youths have a very vital role to play.

The WTO D.G who was one of the high profile panelists at the UBA Africa Conversations 2021 disclosed when the vaccine inequity the continent is battling with is reversed, it will be “ able to create the kind of platform, the kind of hope that will give our young entrepreneurs epitomize by Sola Akinlade the founder of Paystack who addressed presidents at Aries, the recent financing Africa summit and showed the world that Africa and its youth can be part of the present but also a very important part of the future” during the event monitored by societynow.ng.

Akinlade is the co-founder of Paystack, a leading online payment system in Nigeria acquired by Stripe in an historic development – the largest corporate acquisition – valued at $200m.

Okonjo-Iweala who commended the continent’s leaders for adopting a one Africa approach in battling the pandemic on their turf, however, stressed the need to quickly correct what she described as vaccine inequity.

“If we are to recover sustainable from this crisis we have to correct the vaccine inequity that is so evident in the world today, the fact that we have vaccinated so little of our population is not acceptable” Okonjo-Iweala pointed out and offered possible solutions backed by assurance of support from the World Trade Organization “We cannot recover sustainable without it, so we have to fight for it. Whether it is getting more vaccines in from outside production, whether it is manufacturing our own and the WTO stands ready to do its bit keep the supply chain open for this manufacture”

Okonjo-Iweala who rose to the number two position (Managing Director Operations)in a 25years stint as Development Economist at World Bank, however, provided deep insight into the “staggering” prosperity beyond the curve with the revelations that “The IMF (International Monetary Fund) just did an interesting study where they showed that if we spend 50billion dollars additional vaccinate 40% of the world’s population by 2021 and up to 60% by 2022 we would be able to reverse this vaccine inequity and the world can actually gain 9trillion more dollars by 2025, I mean the numbers are staggering compare 50Billion to 9trillion we could make if we did this right because I am a finance minister we could collect One trillion dollars in taxes , this is something they have also talked about so it is important for the world we reverse this vaccine inequality and Africa benefits from it.”

Named Global Finance Minister for the year by Euromoney in 2005, Okonjo-Iweala was a panelist at the UBA Africa Conversations 2021 alongside Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organisation(WHO) and Mr. Makhtar Sop Diop, Managing Director, International Finance Corporation(IFC) and President Paul Kagame of Rwanda.

The event, which held virtually, was moderated by the champion of everything positive about Africa, Tony Elumelu.

Elumelu among positions- and initiator of different economic booster initiatives – is the Group Chairman, UBA, and Founder of the Tony Elumelu Foundation.