Baltimore — 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?
Chrysler Corporation joined CCA on its inception, recognizing the need to develop all of the economies of the world. Without a strong Africa participating in the world economy, there would be a market of hundreds of millions of people that wouldn't be able to buy our products. Our chairman Jürgen E. Schrempp, has a great deal of understanding of Africa and the needs of Africa and has been a leader in the development of southern Africa. Much of his early career was in the Mercedes operation in South Africa.
I believe that it's very important for the U.S. business community to reach out and support Africa, because of all the negative influences in our psyche perpetuated over the years. Being an African American with a connection to Africa, I have personally had an interest in trying to ensure that this country is fair and balanced in its foreign policy and its economic support of the continent.
DaimlerChrysler has been recognized for taking a leadership role in the fight against HIV/Aids, and health issues have been prominent on the agenda of this summit. Why is that?
The CCA recognizes the importance of addressing the HIV/Aids issue as a part of our overall thrust to increase U.S. trade and investment in Africa, and with Africa. If we're going to convince a U.S. company to locate an operation in Africa, we need to also be in a position to counsel them and advise them on just how to view the HIV/Aids problem and how to go about dealing with it. It is also viewed a challenge, an impediment, and a barrier and we think for that reason alone, we as a business organization can not afford to ignore it. As you may know, that was recognized by the Gates Foundation, who awarded us with a sizable contribution a couple years ago to work with the business community in putting together workplace programs.
As an organization, CCA worked with the administration to get the president's U.S.$15 billion package passed a couple of years ago. We are committed to continue to highlight this issue and address it.
At DaimlerChrysler, about a half dozen years ago, the company made a decision to invest U.S.$200 million dollars in a new facility in South Africa, an expanded facility in East London to build all the right-hand drive Mercedes C-class vehicles for the rest of the world. In making that investment, we knew that we had a pretty serious HIV/Aids problem, and so we worked to put together what we think has become a world-class model program to address not only our employees but also the families of our employees. It's a pretty sophisticated healthcare package that has not eliminated the problem but certainly has put the problem in the category of many other health issues that have to be managed. As a result of that effort, our workforce is stable, relatively healthy, and, if they have HIV/Aids, there's a program to deal with it. We think our products are world class in quality and very competitive with all of our other products made in Germany and other parts of the world.
HIV/Aids is an issue that we will be living with for a longtime. But It's not just an African issue. As we invest in other parts of the world, it's a Chinese problem, it's an Indian problem, it's a Russian problem today. HIV/Aids is a worldwide phenomenon.
Some of the participants and artisanal exhibitors we talked to expressed disappointment that they were not able to find links to business partners or investors here, as they had hoped.
Certainly one of the main objectives of the summit was business-to-business connections. I don't have the numbers yet on participation, but a common issue at our previous summits was being able to attract enough U.S. business and enough African businesses that have common interests - services or products for trade or for joint ventures. It's very much an art as to how to do that, and I think we have to continue to make it more of a science. For future summits, we may have to have specific requests that we harvest from African businesses and countries and match those here. I think to cast the net and bring African business together and do the same thing for the U.S. may or may not result in a good match up.
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There wasn't the same level of participation by administration or the Congress as there was in 2003 when the summit was addressed by President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell and other Cabinet officers and several leading Senators and Representatives. Why was that?
That's an accurate observation. We believe that it had to do, in part, with the location of the summit. Last time, it was literally blocks away from the White House, so it was quite easy, and a lot less time consuming, too, for top administration officials. We also recognize that several current officials are relatively new, whether we're talking about the secretary of State or the USTR [United States Trade Representative].
We had a good participation from senior levels of the administration, just not the top. We also did not have as many African heads of state as we had two years ago, in part because the White House hosted some meetings recently that brought in a number heads of state from Africa, and that caused them not be able to make two trips to the U.S. so soon.
I believe very strongly that the quality of the summit has to do with business-to-business match ups, the deals that are done, and the progress that we make in that area. It really isn't about and should not be measured on the basis of high \-level government officials. Keep in mind that this is the CorporateCouncil on Africa. We must have good partnerships with governments. Governments have to support private enterprise. But at the end of the day, what's going to move the needle in Africa is private enterprise, and this summit should emphasize business and the private enterprise sector more than the government sector.
