allAfrica.com: Africa: Summit Had Good Attendance and Deals Got Done, Says Corporate Council Leader (Page 1 of 2)

Africa: Summit Had Good Attendance and Deals Got Done, Says Corporate Council Leader

Addresses by World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Constance Newman and Paul Applegarth from the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation highlighted the final days' plenaries of the U.S.-Africa Business Summit, which ended Friday in Baltimore, Maryland and attracted an estimated 2,000 participants.

Other plenary speakers included Dr. Robert Gallo, who directs the Institute of Human Virology, Prof. Charles Soludo, governor of Nigeria's Central Bank, Jean-Louis Ekra, president of the African Export-Import Bank, and Maryland's Lt. Governor Michael Steele, who participated in several conference sessions. Among the corporate leaders who spoke were Jeffrey Sturchio of Merck & Co., Desi Lopez Fafie from Oracle, Chris Finlayson from Shell, Henry McGhee from Conoco Phillips, John Watson of Chevron, Jeffrey N. Morgan from Mars, Jerry Steiner from Monsanto, Van Yeutter from Cargill, David Cooke from M&T Bank and Colin Coleman from Goldman Sachs International.

U.S.officials who made appearances included Cindy Courville, senior director for African Affairs at the National Security Council, U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Andrew Natsios, April H. Foley, vice-chair of the U.S. Export-Import Bank, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Treasury David Loevinger.

Attendees also took part in workshops on a range of topics and heard from four African presidents - Armando Guebuza of Mozambique, Marc Ravalomanana of Madagascar, Zambia's Levy Mwanawasa and Laurent Gbagbo of Côte d'Ivoire, whose presence attracted a small but vocal demonstration protesting ongoing disunity in the country.

Four previous summits have been organized biennially since 1997 by the Corporate Council on Africa, whose 200 members account for about 85 percent of U.S. investment in Africa and include Fortune 500 companies and small and medium size firms. Frank Fountain, DaimlerChrysler senior vice-president for external affairs and public policy who chairs the council's board, talked about the summit in an AllAfrica interview as the meeting concluded. Excerpts.

How do you assess the outcome at this point?

I think this will probably go down in history as the best one so far. We had great attendance. We believe the numbers will end of being close to 2,000. We had great participation from the African governments, the African business community, and the U.S. government and the U.S. business community. So we are quite pleased with the level of engagement, with a great number of well planned workshops where you are able to get into the substance of the issues. I think we are going end this one this afternoon with a great sendoff and with participants feeling good about their experiences here this week.

What were some of the highlights from your vantage point?

Backing up through the week, we were fortunate last evening to have Dr. Paul Wolfowitz here with us. His first public address outside of Washington since becoming president of the World Bank a few weeks ago. I think Africa is going to have a great friend in the head of the World Bank, and someone who will be a strong champion of African causes. He brings to the World Bank great influence and connections with agencies of the U.S. government. I believe that he will mobilize resources that we have not seen before, in support of Africa.

We had some deals done this week. One of our board members has been working on a railroad connection between Mozambique, Zambia, and other countries in the area, and I think he's pretty much finalized the arrangement.

We've had great participation by more small businesses than we've had in the past. The backbone of the U.S. economy is small and medium size business, and CCA has a good mix of large and small companies. One of the things we will continue to do is to reach out into middle America and to mid-size and small business that may already be doing business in Asia, Latin America, and other places in the world, but for various reasons have not considered Africa.

There do seem to be a larger concentration of smaller companies than there were at previous summits.

Yes, exactly. We've also reached out to minority businesses in the United States. We believe that diversity is important and that there's a good deal of capacity in, for example, the minority auto supplier base. That led DaimlerChrysler to sponsor a trade mission last Fall. We took fifteen minority suppliers - black, Latino and Asian suppliers - to South Africa to meet with black empowerment suppliers to the auto industry there in an effort to not only help the Black Economic Empowerment initiative that has been launched by the South African government but also help the U.S. suppliers begin to think more globally and to partner with black South African suppliers in an effort to not only impart expertise but to possibly expand their customer base, and vice versa. So that we had at this conference some members of that group, both U.S. and African, as well as our top procurement chief for DaimlerChrysler worldwide, who was here to conduct a workshop on that mission. We're hoping that other companies will do the same.

Why does a large company like yours decide to join CCA?

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