Afreximbank: $36bn deals sealed at intra-African trade fair

The African Import and Export Bank (Afreximbank) says about $36 billion deals were sealed at the just concluded Intra-African Trade Fair (IATF). 

Kanayo Awani, managing director of IATF at Afreximbank, said this at the closing ceremony of the fair.

Awani added that transactions were still ongoing on Sunday.

“I want to highlight that as of now we had about $36 billion in deals concluded at IATF 2021,” Awani said.

“IATF also attracted 70 sponsors, about 51 had exhibition stands,” she added.

At the fair, Afrieximbank had signed a $1.04 billion deal with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to bolster oil production in Nigeria.

According to Awani, there was an excess turnout of 11,828 physical attendees at variance with the projection of about 10,000 attendees at the fair. 

She also said that attendees from South Africa, Egypt, Côte d’Ivoire, and Nigeria doubled compared with 2018.

“In all, we had 59 countries that participated, 46 from Africa, and the rest were from outside of Africa, Awani added.

“In all, we take into consideration, delegates, exhibitors, visitors, buyers, debt speakers. There were participants in IATF 2021 activities from 128 countries.”

The managing director said that the fair overdid itself in terms of non-hall exhibitors exceeding the initial target of 1100 exhibitors, recording 1,161 exhibitors and 833 exhibiting companies.

Further detailing the accomplishments of the fair, Awani added that creative exhibitors (CANEX) were a total of 46, youth exhibitors were 47, auto exhibitors reached 19, and 216 virtual exhibitors were documented.

According to Awani, the hybrid event, which recorded over 27,000 registrations, made a great effort to promote the event through extensive media coverage on several digital channels.

“As you all know the IATF virtual as we call it was going on in parallel, so this was a highbred programme,” the managing director said.

“And the statistics also show that for the IATF virtual, we had over almost 27,000 registrations.

“So we also made a strong effort to publicise the programme in digital media. In this regard, various aspects of the programme were live-streamed.

“These were the trade and investment programme, full-day live streaming, the start-up programmes and automotive forums were live-streamed. There were side events outside of this arena that we could not live-stream.

“We also had a lot of media coverage, Live TV coverage and as well as a thousand pieces of daily coverage across the continents in Arabic, in English, French and Portuguese,” she said.

Awani said that the 2023 IATF will hold in Côte d’Ivoire.