Now that sixth edition of the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD VI) is upon us, Guardian Online has gone to extremes to bring our valued readers, advertisers, investors and businesspersons relevant information relating to the Summit that will be held at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre (KICC) in Nairobi, Kenya from August 23th to August 29th 2016.
We invite you to join this platform and make it as interactive as possible. It is here that we will give you links to meet companies and multinationals that will be participating in the Summit and its adjuncts such as the Africa-Japan Business Forum and the Japan Fair, where you can be able to rub shoulders and per chance, strike short term or long-term investment deals with some of Japan’s big names companies.
This information will also appeal to our public sector, our government officers who will be travelling to Nairobi to the Summit as well as the Civil Society (Non State Actors) organisations that will be participating or are hoping to contribute to their country or continent’s development agenda through partnerships with Japanese private and public sector companies and their civil societies.
We hope that at the end the end of the Summit Business Botswana (BB); Botswana Investment and Trade Centre (BITC) and Botswana Council of Non-Governmental Organisations (BOCONGO) and the Ministries of Trade, Industry and Investment and Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation will have something tangible and beneficial to report back to Batswana in the areas of Industrialisation; Health Water and Sanitation and Social Stability, these being the key thematic areas for cooperation identified by the TICAD co-sponsors, Japan Government; United Nations; African Union Commission and United Nations Development Programme under the three year circle of TICAD VI, that ends in 2019.
TICAD can best be described as Japan’s overseas development assistance (ODA) for Africa. The summit level conferences started in 1993 and have been held after every five-years in Japan’s cities until 2013 in Yokohama when the African Union Commission joined as a co-sponsor and it was agreed that both Japan and Africa alternate in hosting the summit to enforce the principle of ‘African ownership’ and international partnership, that underpins the cooperation framework. As a result, Kenya was identified as the host of the first-ever summit to be held in Africa.