The emergent global economy is built on a foundation of international trade and investment on two levels. One is intra-regional, involving countries on the same continent through a single market. Africa’s version of this is the Africa Free Trade Agreement which has been fully signed up to by African countries and which will commence from mid 2020 and which creates the largest single market in the world, as measured by numbers of nations and spatial size of the common market.

The other involves inter-continental trade and investment. Here, the US, China and most recently Russia rank among the countries seeking to increase their trade and investment relations with Africa even as the continent’s traditional partners, the European Union in general and the United Kingdom, France and Portugal in particular take active steps to further enhance their already strong relationships established since the colonial era.

However within Africa itself and on other potential; trade and investment counterparty continents their remains considerable distrust of potential African counterparties despite the fact that the continent has some of the world’s best behaved corporations and most respectable entrepreneurs and CEOs.

The Awards scheme therefore sets out to identify such enterprises and their owners/CEOs and publicly recognize them before an international audience in the worlds business and finance capital.

Thus awardees will effectively receive public endorsements at the awards with regards to their capacity to engage in international trade and investment activity in a most efficacious way.