Excellency HE Excellency Mr Essis State Secretary & MD
CEPICI, Madam Meena Varma General Manager EXIM Bank of India, Mr Philip Pango
DG VITIB, Pushpesh Resident Manager EXIM Bank, Captains of Industry from India
and Cote d’Ivoire. Good afternoon and welcome to India-Cote Business Forum.
It is an honour for me to be addressing this
distinguished gathering of captains of industry & entrepreneurs from India
and Cote d’Ivoire. At the outset let me take this opportunity to thank the Cote
d’Ivoire CEPICI, Ministry of Commerce & Industry. I also pay my highest respect and
gratitude to individuals and organisations that has been working and
contributing to concretise the Cote d’Ivoire-India friendship and cooperation.
India and Cote
d’Ivoire are separated by geography but have common history, aspirations and converging
views on many international issues. India and Cote d’Ivoire have
complementarities in their economies and this have provided great opportunities
for win-win cooperation. Indian
business also has comparative advantage to start their operation in Africa. I
say this because Indians are not a new entrant in this entire continent of
Africa. Indian workers, professionals, and traders have long been travelling to
& fro, settled in vast swathes of Africa, over the last two centuries. More
over since the independence of India from colonial rule as did many Africa
countries, our relationship was driven & nurtured by south-south
cooperation.
India has forged a unique development partnership
with Africa based on African priorities driven by their African needs. The
focus of India’s development partnership is to build human resource development
and capacity building in Africa. India has extended development assistance
worth $ 7.4 billion through lines of credit given by the EXIM bank. Of this
$6.8 billion has been approved and about $3.5 billion, nearly half, has been
disbursed. These lines of credit have led to the completion of 137 projects in
41 countries across Africa. We inaugurated one today in Grand Bassam.
Africa as a continent including Cote
d’Ivoire is increasingly becoming the next theatre of global attraction and
competition because of rich natural resources, young demography and scope of socio-economic
development. To harness these opportunities various countries are making huge
investments in the continent. Cote d’Ivoire is not an exception, in fact is one
of the main drivers as it enjoyed unprecedented economic growth of 8-9% since 2011
under the leadership of President Alassane Ouattara. This
growth is expected to continue as the government continue to reform its macroeconomic
policies to make investors friendly coupled with rapid expansion in sectors
like tourism & Hospitalities, banking & Services, IT & telecommunications,
manufacturing and agriculture.
Today
Cote d’Ivoire is a vibrant country with lots of young people with big dreams
and aspirations. These young vibrant people are now demanding better governance, democracy, the rule of law and
better life like never before. The challenge before us is
whether we could join our hands and make these dreams and aspirations come to
pass.
To me all of you seating here has the capability to
ignite these minds and both governments have the political will and desire to
help remove any stumbling block that may come on your way while working out
win-win cooperation. There are huge
opportunities for smart companies to tap this huge opportunity whether you are
a retailer, whether you are a product supplier, a realty company or a software
solution provider, a financier or logistic player etc.”
I would like to conclude that saying that “Cote
d’Ivoire is calling and the world is responding”. My request to all business
from Cote d’Ivoire & India is that take advantage of this meeting and form
partnership for win-win cooperation. Embassy of India would be more than happy
to cooperate/support for partnership between India-Cote d’Ivoire companies.
I Thank you all. The theme of our cooperation is shared
prosperity which is geared towards addressing priority areas of our partners.
