Officials, tourist industry leaders and community organizations from South Africa’s Eastern Cape province met in Port Elizabeth in June to ensure the region uses the 2010 FIFA World Cup to create a solid basis for reducing poverty, through a lasting boom in tourism.

Ask anyone about Africa and the first response you get is a negative picture of conflict, hunger, HIV/AIDS and other health issues. But question a bit more and it’s clear that Africa is becoming a promising place for business. Africa has been described as the “The Last Big Emerging Market” with great opportunity and potential. The success of the market is essential if we wish to address the biggest challenge of our times: reducing poverty.

ITC's vision to develop trade, contained in its Strategy for Africa, rests on boosting intra-African trade flows, promoting networking between trade support institutions, building a positive brand, ensuring that poverty and gender issues are in the mainstream of its activities, and building effective partnerships.

It works with African institutions and reaches out to new players who influence trade and business development in civil society.

Making investment work for long-term development is a challenge facing both resource-rich and income-poor countries.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) has boomed in Africa over the last 12 months — with record-breaking inflows of $38.8 billion in 2006, a 26.5% rise — and this revival looks set to continue. Africa’s challenge is to seize this opportunity to help boost domestic productive capacities, enabling broader economic and human development over the long term.

CLICK HERE to see how Africa is presenting a new face through a stronger role for women, a world of potential in services, upgrading traditional exports, and building foundations for prosperity.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s economic stability, combined with a favourable global growth climate, now offers opportunities that the region has begun to exploit. But further work is needed at the “micro” level to accelerate progress on the Millennium Development Goals.

Johnnic Communications, also known as Johncom, is one of Africa’s largest media and entertainment groups with interests ranging from bookshops to movie theatres clustering around its newspaper, music and film distribution business. It shares major links with a British multimedia giant but the South African company has always been a champion of South–South trade. Now it is expanding vigorously in Nigeria to help develop the potential of what has been called the Nollywood film business.

An Ethiopian woman entrepreneur links poor weavers with rich traditions to wealthy, culture-seeking buyers.

Traditionally in Ethiopia, men weave and women spin. Muya also trains women as weavers, to help them gain financial independence.

In this award-winning business case, technology opens new job opportunities and allows Bushmen to share their valuable knowledge to conserve the environment.

Rwandan coffee is featured at Starbucks this year. The path to creating a premium, well-branded coffee from a low-return mass product involved both aid agencies and private firms.

This Tunisian businessman is representative of his country’s effort to position itself in Information and Communications Technology (ICT).

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a prerequisite to do business in Africa. Shell’s African Vice President explains.

Sierra Leone’s export development authorities are working to revitalize the ginger industry, a route out of poverty after years of war. This story is based on an interview with Abu Bakkar Kebbay, from the export development agency of the Ministry of Trade and Industry.

Tanzania is working to make itself better known to attract foreign buyers and tourists.

Africa has traditionally not been on the radar screen of foreign direct investors. The reasons include the “Balkanization” of the continent and hence its small markets, its weak infrastructure and an image problem: in much of the world Africa’s image is dominated by pictures of civil war, sickness and famine.

Countries are putting priority on trade-related assistance in this new model for financing development projects, by the Millennium Challenge Corporation.

A new partnership to develop trade in Africa will back up the efforts of businesses and governments at a time when Africa’s trade prospects are looking up.

Mobile phone use in Africa is growing fast. As computers and the Internet revolutionized business in the West, so mobile technology can help solve business problems for African exporters.

Civil society can help trade negotiators take more development-oriented positions in trade talks.

Civil society, including women’s organizations and the media, can help Africa’s quest for an equitable world trading system, said participants from these institutions at a workshop of the Joint Integrated Technical Assistance Programme (JITAP) in Accra, Ghana.

China is expanding its cooperation with ITC and with developing countries.

China’s Vice Minister of Commerce, Yi Xiaozhun, met with ITC’s Executive Director, Patricia Francis, in November 2006 to explore cooperation to reduce poverty in rural China and support China’s growing trade and investment ties to Africa.

Providing relief supplies is big business. Donors and international aid agencies spend billions of dollars annually. The door to the aid market, traditionally considered complex and inaccessible, has been all but closed to countries in Africa, for example. ITC’s programme, Buying for Africa from Africa, has contributed to changing this. As its success grows, other regions are following suit.

Leather is one of the world’s most widely traded commodities. The trade in leather and leather products — worth more than US$ 60 billion per year — is predicted to grow. The African leather sector is bursting with potential, but there is a wide gap between resources and production. ITC’s development programme has galvanized the sector.