[Nigeria] Africa Offers Major Growth Potential - Visa Integration Index

Visa Nigeria has released the second annual Visa Africa Integration Index that measures the degree of economic integration within key trade corridors of sub-Saharan Africa, namely West Africa, East Africa and Southern Africa.

The purpose of the Index is to better understand and to help facilitate economic growth from greater cross-border interaction and economic openness. Together with its partners, Visa touches 500 million people in Africa.

Country Manager Visa West Africa, Ade Ashaye, said: "Since the launch of the Visa Africa Integration Index in 2013 the African economy has extended its best period of economic growth on record by delivering growth of 4.8 percent in 2013. Our objective was to construct an index for a number of selected sub-Saharan African countries to measure their global and regional integration.

"The Index is built from country-level macroeconomic data, and a wealth of proprietary data drawn from Visa in sub-Saharan Africa, that sum to more than 4 million observations measured across 19 elements. The final outputs are economic integration scores at the country and regional levels measured on a semi-annual basis for the period 2011-2013. We want to better understand Africa to help unleash the enormous growth potential in electronic payments on the continent, now the heart of the developing world."

Ashaye noted that it is widely expected that buoyant economic growth will continue for the foreseeable future and it is likely that the African economy will achieve a growth rate approaching 5.5 percent in 2014. With a collective gross domestic product (GDP) of over $1.9 trillion - a figure that is expected to exceed $2.6 trillion by 2020.

Against this backdrop, this report provides an update to the first edition of the Visa Africa Integration Index that was published in 2013.

The study offers a detailed analysis of key country clusters in sub-Saharan Africa, revealing strengths and areas of growth potential.

The clusters are; West Africa, Ghana and Nigeria; East Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania; Southern Africa, South Africa, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Zambia.