2015 Economic Dev’t in Africa Report launched The Economic Development in Africa Report 2015, a flagship document of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), has been launched in Accra. This year’s report was titled, “Unlocking the potential of Africa’s Services Trade for Growth and Development”. Services are now the main driver of growth in 30 out of 54 African countries, the Report has revealed. The report, launched by the United Nations information Centre (UNIC), notes that the services sector, though a critical source of income and employment, and therefore, a dynamic driver of growth in Africa in recent years, has not translated into the kind of structural transformation required to address the continent’s development needs and is delivered at a high cost. According to the Report, the services sector in Africa required more regionally-coherent services policies to help achieve sustainable economic development on the continent. The report underscores the importance of infrastructure services to achieving the sustainable development goals being set by the United Nations for 2016-2030 and identifies infrastructural services such as water and sanitation as having a direct impact on the sustainable development goals and targets central to achieving social development outcomes, while services such as electricity, telecommunications and transport contribute to productivity and determine the competitiveness of African firms. The report notes that from 2009 to 2012, the services sector in Africa grew at a rate of 4.6 per cent and that in the developing world, the fastest growing services subsectors are transport, storage and communication. According to the report, some African economies have developed their services industries with relative success and are even sourcing services to African markets, citing as examples the financial and banking services industries of countries such as Mauritius and Nigeria, the commercial and cargo air transport industries of Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa, educational services industries of Uganda, telecommunications services of Egypt and the port services industries of Djibouti and Kenya. The Report, therefore, urges Africa to tap the huge potential of its services sector and build on the established intra-African trade which has a more sophisticated composition than its commodity exports to the rest of the world and a higher intensity of the services component. In his remarks at the launch, Dr Yao Graham, Co-ordinator of Third World Network-Africa (TWN-Africa), a pan-African research and advocacy organisation which works for economic and social equity within Africa and for an equitable place for Africa in the global order, noted that the Report represented a giant leap in creating the knowledge base needed for understanding the relationship between services and all economic activity in Africa. Dr Graham said the report also showed the need for better regulatory and institutional frameworks in Africa's infrastructure services sector, and contained key data to demonstrating how the services sector could enable African countries to boost the prosperity of their peoples. Please Find Attached the Full Report GBC/ISD