Andrew Dabalen, the Chief Economist for the Africa Region at the World Bank, has expressed optimism regarding the forecasted 3.8% growth in Sub-Saharan African countries by 2025.
The World Bank’s Africa Pulse Report for April 2024 anticipates growth in Africa in the coming years. The report also suggests that domestic resource mobilization and international support can alleviate the region’s funding constraints, and investments in human capital and local service delivery capacity can empower people to capitalize on market opportunities.
In an interview on Citi TV’s The Point of View, Dabalen acknowledged that Africa’s per capita growth has been lower in the past decade, but views the 2024 rebound of 3.4% as a positive development compared to the last three to four years.
“All those years what we have seen is a lot of hardships, for the first time in four years, we’re beginning to see a rebound of the economic activity. Last year [2023] we estimated growth to be 2.6% in Africa. On average, we can talk about specific regions that have outperformed and others that have not. This year rebounded to 3.4% and we have forecasted that in 2025, it will be about 3.8%.
“What we’re saying is that this is a good development, it’s positive. We can talk about the link between inequality, in general view this accounts for population which is not completely unusual. In the last decade, Africa’s growth has been less than or around 1% in per capita terms. This will be a ball in the park. It’s positive news compared to the last three, or four years. That is important to acknowledge.”
Dabalen attributed the recovery of growth in parts of Africa to the various reforms implemented by governments to reduce inflation and interest rates.
“It’s primarily driven by a recovery in private consumptions because inflation has come down substantially in a lot of these countries. Because of normalization of the global supply chain, steady decline commodity prices, the impact of reforms that these countries have done in order to bring inflation, interest rates down, so those are the drivers,” he said.
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