African economies will grow 4.5 percent this year and 5 percent in 2016, approaching levels last seen before the 2007 global financial crisis, as economic prospects improve worldwide, the African Development Bank (AfDB) said. The AfDB estimates that Africa's gross domestic product expanded by 3.9 percent in 2014 despite sharp falls in international commodity and oil prices, an Ebola epidemic and pockets of political instability and armed conflict.
"If you ask me today what I think of events affecting Africa and African economies in 2014, I would say the lesson pertaining is resilience in the face of global adversity," the AfDB's chief economist Steve Kayuzzi-Mugerwa said. "And prospects for 2015 are pretty good," he said at a presentation of the African Economic Outlook report at the start of the bank's annual meetings in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
The AfDB is a multilateral lender set up in 1964 to promote sustainable economic growth and reduce poverty in Africa. In the years prior to the global crisis, African economic growth averaged between 5 and 7 percent. Returning to those levels over the next two years will depend largely on a continued recovery in major economies that is stimulating demand for Africa's exports, the report said. Africa's rebound is also likely to be uneven, added the report, published in partnership with the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development and the United Nations Development Programme.
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