An editorial today in one of South Africa’s leading financial news publications, Business Daily, enthusiastically welcomed the outcome of last week’s Japan-Africa summit in Yokohama.
The summit, known as TICAD7, focused a lot of attention on directing Japan’s vast private sector to invest in Africa and avoid loading countries up with huge amounts of potentially unsustainable debt. Although there was no official monetary figure announced in the final declaration, as is customary with these kinds of conferences, Tokyo indicated that it hopes around $20 billion of Japanese private sector financing will make its way to the continent over the next three years.