The Quality Infrastructure and Standardization for Africa Economic Growth

THEME: ROLE OF QUALITY INFRASTRUCTURE AND STANDARDIZATION IN FACILITATING TRADE AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT WITHIN THE AFRICAN CONTINENTAL FREE TRADE AREA(CFTA)

AUTHOR: HUMPHREY C. SAMATI

EMAIL: humphreysamati@gmail.com

“The Quality Infrastructure and Standardization for Africa Economic Growth”

The African Development Bank reported Africa to be the World’s second-fastest growing economy, and estimates the average growth of 3.4% in 2017, while growth is expected to increase by 4.3% in 2018.

Intra-African trade has enormous potential to create employment, catalyses investment and foster growth in Africa and indeed effective Quality Infrastructure and Standardization is necessary to facilitate the cross border trades among African countries.

Infrastructures are the fundamental facilities and systems serving a society. It typically characterizes technical structures such as roads, airports, railways, bridges, tunnels, water supply, sewers, electrical grids, telecommunications. These services and facilities are necessary for economy to function.

Infrastructures are basic requirement of economic development. It does directly produce goods, services and facilitates production in primary, secondary and tertiary economic activities by creating positive external economies.

In Africa bad infrastructure represents one of the most significant limitations to economic growth and achievement to the Millennium Development Goals.

Standardization is the process of implementing and developing technical standards based on the consensus of different parties that include firms, users, interest groups, standards organizations and governments. ISO regards standard as a document that provides requirements, specifications, guidelines or characteristics that can be used consistently to ensure that materials, products and services are fit for their purpose.

Africa is undoubtedly a sleeping standard adherence, as many small entrepreneurs are not aware with standard in their products despite the education which is always given by their government’s bureaus of Standard.

The Quality Infrastructure and Standardization is an inevitable way in order to outshine intra-Africa trade and sustainable development within The African continent. This call for all Africans particularly leaders to consider it in their policies and strategies as I address in this paper.

Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of electric charge. Industrialization needs Electric energy for production, the production process cannot smoothly run without electricity, the productivity increases as the enough and all time electricity is available.

According to 2017 Africa Economic Outlook, Twenty-five(25) of the 54 countries in Africa, including Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana and Senegal, deal with frequent power crises characterized by outages, irregular supply and surging electricity costs, This is not a good indicator for effective industrial development, African need to reconsider this by bring new technologies for energy production, this will increase the number of products in the market till the saturation and will facilitate countries in trading activities across the continent and in the world at large.

Water is a basic need of life, is likely to surpass the scarcity of many other commodities during the twenty first century.The availability of enough and clean water is a matter to consider, the reason for this is that the supply or presence of unclean water which has pathogens can cause health problems in the community, people will be affected by using contaminated water, this will cause a nation to have affected people who are not able to produce and trade across the continent , Moreover Industries need full supply of clean water for their production for example breweries need water for cleaning of used bottles and during fermentation process. The water supply schemes and sanitation program are matters to consider in order to facilitate the sustainable development and trade across the continent.

Road as raw materials and products transmission medium,The beginning of road construction is dated to the time of the romans, they were the key to Rome’s Military might and growth of their empire. In Africa there is a Tans-Africa Highway network comprises transcontinental road projects developed by United Nationals Economic Commission for Africa(UNECA), The Africa Development Bank(ADB) and The African Union in conjunction with regional international communities,They aim to promote trade and alleviate poverty in Africa through highway infrastructure.

Most of the Africa countries lack good roads within their countries and across their borders, poor gravel roads from interior to town areas, for example The road networks in Tanzania according to TANROADS include 86,472Km of roads of which 12,786Km are trunk roads, 21,105Km are regional roads and the remaining 52,581Km are district, urban and feeder roads.AS of 2013, 19% of Tanzania’s national roads(6,439.29Km) and 2% of its district roads(1,069.2Km) were paved, Moreover even the paved roads are not properly maintained for example Tanzania to Zambia road(TANZAM HIGHWAY) has so many  corrugations, ruts and patched potholes which reduces the smoothness of the road and increases the maintenance cost of vehicles and frequently road accidents.

 The Road network across the country and continental borders facilitate the transportation process by smoothing travel and reduction of  time from industries to costumers, road service exhibits high networks effects, As delivering time reduces the number of users increase ,the marginal productivity of investments on Infrastructure rise with scale and spread of the network and exceeds the average productivity of investment until the market is saturated, as saturation reaches the trade will be strengthen and the economic growth will be reached.

Standardization are used by Business and Government this helps to protect health, environment, quality, security, production and consumer protection. The effective implementation supports sustainable development and facilitates trade. In order to facilitates free and smooth trade within Africa this call to have conformity in Assessment of our services, this is a barrier in many countries because of this differences, for example specification for drinking water in Kenya according to KS:05-459:part1:1996 Cyanide maximum is 0.01mg/l  and According to Tanzania standard(rural water supplies 1974) is 0.20mg/l,  even in civil works South Africa uses South Africa Standard in designing procedures while A country like Algeria Adopts Euro Standard. This non-conformity decreases the speed of goods pass through the borders and sometimes rejections.

Protecting human safety and health are fruits of follow standards. The quality and safety standards allow consumers to assess the quality or safety of a product before purchasing it and enable regulators to remove unsafe products from the market. Failure to comply with standards can lead to significant consequences. For example, water quality need to be tested before reaches to a consumer without doing so can lead to diseases like cancer if some of inorganic compounds are in highly excess or to typhoid and cholera if organic compound requirements are unchecked. A Nation without stable people is like a student without materials at the end of the day no development will prosper.

Animals and other organisms in their totality need favorable environment for their survival, back to principles of ecology every organism survival is linkage to other organisms. Standardisation in a large extent helps to protect the environment, Standard controls the effluent comes from Industries which if are not controlled can cause the death of aquatic animals, reduction of river capacity, moreover it controls water borne diseases, Eutrophication i.e. growth of plant species due to high concentration of nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus).

Conclusively, Development is what we all need, for us to get there without sound infrastructures and standardization of services, productions it will be a dream, Africa we need to come as one to put strategies and good policies, we need to be so visionary in order to meet those goals. “but things that are worth doing are often not easy”.