The African Continental Free Trade Agreement commenced on January 1, 2021, offering the opportunity for enterprises from all the signatory countries to trade with each other on duty free basis. However despite the huge progress made towards structuring the pan African single market the biggest obstacle to intra African trade and investment remains firmly on place – lack of trust and confidence in fellow African trade counterparties and investment partners, as well as lack of adequate capacity for identifying and conducting due diligence on such potential counterparties and partners.

The primary objective of our annual award scheme is to identify some of the leading CEOs in Africa – and by implication the enterprise they lead – so that enterprises across the continent can have a guide as to some of the counterparties they can safely do business with.’ This enables Africa’s hitherto unexploited capacity with regards to intra-continental to be unlocked by enterprises who are guided by our awards as to whom to do business with as a starting point. Thus the award facilitates intra-African business collaborations and partnerships, as well as provide the building blocks for the creation of cross-border supply and value chains, even as it opens up product/service distribution and consumer markets for products made in other African countries.

Another objective is to provide top tier CEO’s all over the continent with a form of measuring rod through which they can ascertain who well they are doing with regards to both quantitative considerations (as derived by research driven analyses) and public image and appreciation (as ascertained by public voting) when compared against their peers elsewhere on the continent.

Indeed the data analytics will derive a tremendous amount of highly useful information from voting patterns across the continent. The rationale for awards to be conferred on chambers of commerce – which will be done by enlightened selection rather than public voting – is that these chambers can play a front-line role in promoting, facilitating and (self) regulating cross border trade and investment and by identifying and publicly recognizing those that do this in most exemplary manner, they will be motivated to intensify their efforts even further.