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For the month of January 2022, we did a webinar that focused on SDG’s 1 and 13. The purpose of SDG 1 is to end poverty in all its forms and the purpose of SDG 13 is to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. Within this webinar the two SDG’S mentioned were combined to highlight connections between business opportunities and challenges within climate action and poverty reduction in Africa. A memorable quote from Dr. Michael Borish, our guest speaker that we believe connects the two SDGs well in terms of the challenges in this region is how “ the green and blue economies combined with new technologies and education offer the opportunity to Africa to simultaneously create wealth and reduce poverty while battling climate change”. This webinar provided significant knowledge and a valuable perspective on this topic through not only the presentation but also the engaging Q&A. .
Our guest speaker from this webinar, Dr. Michael Borish has more than 34 years of experience in strategic planning, banking and credit, financial sector policy, private sector development, housing finance and risk management. Most of his experience has been in overseas markets. He has an MBA from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Finance at Carleton University. He has managed his own consulting firm for more than 25 years and previously worked at the World Bank in Washington DC and as a consultant to numerous private sector firms and development finance institutions including the African Development Bank in Abidjan.
We want to thank our speaker for sharing his knowledge with us and creating an atmosphere of learning and thoughtful discussions. We are grateful to those who attended the webinar, and we want to make this knowledge accessible to those who could not attend, so we are sharing some memorable points and how to access the webinar recording below.
Dr. Borish discussed some of the broad categories of the enablers and challenges in making progress on opportunities happening in support of poverty reduction, such as industrialization, trade and investment, business environment, physical and social infrastructure, 21st century tech, human capital formation, and payment systems. He stated that “there are some key themes in each of these that are of critical importance as enablers for companies and governments, NGOs, civil society, everybody to be able to capitalize on opportunities and to make progress on both of the SDGs”. Key points that Dr. Boris made on the industrialization enabler/ challenge are:
“Industrialization in this case, what I think is most important is the achievement of scale for businesses in Africa. Most of them are very very small, so how do we increase scale and how do we generate more value added from the production that ensues in Africa?”
We need to increase “the ability of these economies to generate more manufacturing value added rather than simply extracting from the ground or producing food crops and then shipping things off to the Northern hemisphere where most of the value added occurs”
“The key for industrialization in Africa is to increase value added in manufacturing and services for greater wealth creation, greater income generation and job creation. And that is ultimately what will help boost scale and create more competitiveness on the continent and more self sufficiency on the resource base that is need for long term sustainability and poverty reduction”
Webinar Preview
To pay for the full video, visit our webinar recordings page on our website.
Next Webinar Coming Up
Our next webinar will cover SDG 6, clean water and sanitation. This webinar is titled and will discuss Enabling Access to Clean Water and Sanitation. This webinar is especially important because worldwide, one in three people do not have access to safe drinking water, and two out of five people do not have a basic hand-washing facility according to the world health organization. You can stay updated and be ready to save your spot by following us on our social media and subscribing to our mailing list here.
You can also let us know what topics you are interested in for the future webinars by emailing us at programs@environbuzz.com. We hope that you can attend our next webinar in February. To stay updated on our next webinar, you can follow us on our social media and subscribe to our mailing list here.
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