By Leslie Lamptey
Trade
Natural geography – blue for sea, brown for land and green for vegetation – are what we see on google maps and what we’re used to, or the political view where we see lines of borders distinguishing one sovereign nation from the other. This actually shows one one hundredth of what is actually going on.
We need to start looking at the world in a very different way. We believe that connectivity is a human right. Connectivity is why we thrive as a people. Cities, countries – even the remotest of places on earth needs to be connected to enhance their quality of life.
To ACL, the three most important factors for connectivity are Transportation, Energy and Communication systems.
When we have a look at the connectivity atlas of the world, we should be able to see a seamless thread of connections in all the mega infrastructures like airports, gas pipelines, oil pipelines, internet cables, highways and railways as well as their trade links.
These views are very important to us, as our aim is to remove the boundaries and borders, and focus more on a way to bring the 7.7 billion people in the world together.
The challenge of connecting certain remote areas within Africa has the tech giants racing to galvanise themselves and their purses. Like the Amos-6 satellite by facebook which aims to connect 4 billion people to the internet, google laying more than a thousand km of fibre across Africa for broadband, Microsoft exploiting new technologies such as the tv white space, and Elon Musk’s space-x and the launch of 4000 broadband satellites within 5 years… We love the idea of all of this going on, which gives us reason to dream.
The dream of ACL is to enhance connectivity through trade. Our trade in diversified natural resources promotes a market openness, where produce from the remotest of places can be accessed. This is greatly enhanced by the growth in communications and technology. The digital growth means the speed at which sophisticated business transactions are done will pick up tremendously, and would revolutionize trade exponentially. Connecting mining communities in Ghana for instance to Wall Street, or Heinz using quality tomatoes from a remote village in Ghana.