Published: October 25, 2022
Businesses in Sub-Saharan Africa are facing a tough few years, but the nimble and entrepreneurial continent is already showing signs of adapting with more spending on infrastructure and a major adoption of digitisation predicted by some of the region’s top bankers.
The short term for Sub-Saharan Africa looks bleak. With the US Federal Reserve’s interest rate hiking cycle in full swing for the first time since 2018, and now central banks around the world following suite in efforts to tame multi-decade high inflation brought on by the coronavirus pandemic and spurned by the war in Ukraine, the outlook for global growth looks tepid at best.
For a region as dependent on using dollars as the reserve currency as Sub-Saharan Africa, this means dollar liquidity has already started to dry up.
“There is evidence of that across the continent,” Eric Odhiambo, group executive of Ecobank’s corporate and investment bank, told EMEA Finance.