Although Donald Trump-led arguably the most Africa-adverse American administration in history, analysts warn not to expect too much from his successor, Democrat Joe Biden. A look at the likely impact of his win on the US-Africa economic dynamics.



HISTORICALLY, IT HAS NOT MATTERED MUCH for Africa whether Democrats or Republicans sit in the White House. This is largely because the United States (US) has never really had a coherent and constructive Africa policy. So, although outgoing Republican president Donald Trump led arguably the most Africa-adverse American administration in history, analysts warn not to expect too much from his successor, Democrat Joe Biden.



Biden was vice-president in the Obama administration that preceded Trump. But whereas Trump once called African countries “shitholes”, Biden at least is promising to “reengage with the world”.



“He will be more engaging with countries, including Africa,” believes Jannie Rossouw, interim head of Wits Business School in Johannesburg. “Trump really isolated the US from many regions, from very many continents, it was bad relationship all over the place.”



Judd Devermont, director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, agrees.



“I think Biden is going to focus on rebuilding partnerships and that includes at the multilateral level to the state level, to the subnational level,” he says.



“So I think you will first see a refocus on climate change and strengthening international adoptions, which will be of benefit to Africans. It’s clear that Biden is very supportive of the Continental Free Trade Agreement. That is incredibly important. But he has also talked about the importance of subnational governance and particularly urbanization. And so I think we have the potential to see the next administration work with African countries at these multiple levels to unlock their economies.”



Devermont expects the biggest African economies – Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya in particular – to receive significant attention, while the prospects for Ethiopia also look promising.



But Biden has his work cut out for him. Domestic challenges like tackling the Covid-19 pandemic, an economic recession and reckoning with racism are likely to keep him busy during his first few months in office. When his attention finally shifts to international affairs, climate change and trade wars with China can expect to dominate the agenda.



But instead of disparaging Beijing at every turn, like Trump did, Devermont expects there will be a focus on “transparency around norms, around standards, ensuring that African economies are open to US investors. And the more negative elements of a Chinese engagement will be blunted or curbed through shared partnerships with Africans around how foreign countries should invest in their countries, how to form partnerships in their countries.”&nbsp;&nbsp;



Another expectation is that American legislation allowing sub-Saharan African countries preferential entry into the US market will be extended.



Rossouw believes that “Biden will try to find a call partner in countries in Africa, and that might be beneficial, especially for the bigger economies in Africa, such as South Africa. If Johannesburg was an independent country, it would be the ninth largest economy in Africa. So naturally, the interest will first be in the big economies and then there will be spillover effects to the smaller economies.”



Biden has in the past committed Washington to helping the continent manage the challenges of a burgeoning population. The United Nations’ projection that Africa will be home to a quarter of the world’s population by 2050 led him to suggest an urbanization initiative. This would include partnerships between African and American cities planning for growth in critical sectors like energy access, climate change, transportation and water management.



“Urbanization is the key transformation that the continent will undergo in this century and ensuring that African cities, most of whom sit on the coasts, are open for business will be a huge opportunity for US companies,&#8221; says Devermont. &#8220;I wouldn&#8217;t underestimate how important that initiative, depending on what it develops into, can be for the US-Africa economic relationship.&#8221;



Equally important is that the Biden administration reach out to companies that remain skeptical or ignorant about opportunities in Africa and address some of the risks and myths they have about investing on the continent.



Trump’s mission was to make America great but his administration largely disengaged with one of the world’s fastest-growing regions. Time will tell whether his successor fares any better. 



-By PAULA SLIER AND ALLISON GOSNEY

US dollar on the Africa map background

Will The United States Re-Engage With Africa?

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) broke his <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/08/politics/biden-victory-congressional-republican-reaction/index.html" target="_blank">silence</a> about the election on Monday, declining to acknowledge President Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden and defending Trump’s court challenges, though McConnell did not endorse outright Trump’s voter fraud conspiracy theories.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">KEY FACTS</h4>



On the Senate floor, McConnell&nbsp;<a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4922052/senator-mcconnell-president-trump-within-rights-challenge-election-results-court" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said Trump</a>&nbsp;is “100% within his rights” to open legal challenges into allegations of voter fraud, arguing the courts should weigh these accusations and Trump should not be shamed into conceding to Biden in the meantime.



McConnell said states should count all legal ballots and reject illegal ballots, echoing Trump’s baseless claim that last week’s election was riddled with illegal voting, and he said the process should be observable by all sides, possible alluding to a false claim circulating among Trump and his allies that pollwatchers were&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/11/06/trump-and-allies-keep-claiming-republican-poll-watchers-were-banned-thats-a-lie/?sh=2fb971f244da">banned in some states</a>.



Unlike Trump and some of his allies like Rep.&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1325658048585752581" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Matt Gaetz</a>&nbsp;(R-Fla.), McConnell did not repeat any specific fraud allegations or falsely imply Trump was the rightful winner, possibly leaving an exit for himself if the president’s legal challenges are unsuccessful.



He scolded media outlets for projecting a Biden victory and said no state has officially certified its results yet, though in most recent presidential races, news outlets have traditionally called a winner and both candidates have&nbsp;<a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/4024228/what-time-do-the-losing-candidates-usually-concede-the-long-and-short-of-election-night" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">accepted the outcome</a>&nbsp;well before the weeks-long election certification process wraps up.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">CRUCIAL QUOTE</h4>



“President Trump is 100% within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options,” McConnell said&nbsp;<a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4922052/senator-mcconnell-president-trump-within-rights-challenge-election-results-court" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Monday</a>. “If any major irregularities occurred this time of a magnitude that would affect the outcome, then every single American should want them to be brought to light.”



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">TANGENT</h4>



McConnell accused Democrats of hypocrisy for demanding a concession from Trump. He pointed to the fact that Al Gore did not concede to George W. Bush until Dec. 13, 2000 — though&nbsp;<a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/13/gore-concedes-presidential-election-to-bush-dec-13-2000-287285" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">that concession was stalled</a>&nbsp;due to a recount process that sparked a Supreme Court challenge — and he suggested Democrats never accepted the results of the 2016 election. In reality, 2016 challenger Hillary Clinton&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/09/politics/hillary-clinton-concession-speech/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">delivered a concession speech</a>&nbsp;the morning after Election Day, though she still maintained later on that&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/nyregion/hillary-clinton-russia-hacking-election-trump.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Russian interference</a>&nbsp;was partly to blame for her loss.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">KEY BACKGROUND</h4>



Trump has not conceded to Biden yet, instead lodging baseless allegations of voter fraud and inaccurately suggesting he would have won if not for a unified Democratic effort to rig the race. His campaign has launched legal challenges in multiple states alleging voter fraud and violations of poll-watchers’ right to observe the counting process, but several of these lawsuits were swiftly rejected last week due to a lack of evidence, and most experts believe these legal efforts are&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/election-2020-what-are-the-trump-legal-claims-11604876612" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">unlikely to alter</a>&nbsp;the results of the election. Some close Trump allies like his wife Melania and son-in-law Jared Kushner have privately encouraged the president to concede,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/08/politics/jared-kushner-donald-trump-concession/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">CNN reported</a>, though the White House&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/11/08/us/election-results/a-white-house-official-disputed-reports-that-kushner-had-advised-trump-to-concede" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">denied this claim</a>.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">BIG NUMBER</h4>



That’s the number of Republican Senators who have congratulated Biden. Moderate Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Ben Sasse (R-Nev.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) have all acknowledged Biden’s win, though more doctrinaire congressional Republicans have sided with Trump and refused to accept the election’s results.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">FURTHER READING</h4>



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewsolender/2020/11/09/these-are-the-republicans-who-have-acknowledged-bidens-victory/?sh=63cbf5bacedc">These Are The Republicans Who Have Acknowledged Biden’s Victory (Forbes)</a>



-By Joe Walsh, Forbes Staff

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) Holds Media Opportunity With Newly-Elected GOP Senators

McConnell: Trump Has ‘Every Right’ To Challenge Election Loss

There’s a vignette that Senator Kamala Harris likes to tell about her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris. It’s a well-trodden soundbite that has proliferated into hashtags and official 2020 campaign merchandise, but the commercialization shouldn’t detract from its meaning: An immigrant from India who came to the United States with dreams of curing cancer, Shyamala raised Harris and her sister Maya to be strong Black women who are mindful of what their identities mean in American work and life. “My mother would look at me,” Harris has said, “and she’d say, ‘Kamala you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you are not the last.’”



Shyamala was right: Her daughter has been “the first” a number of times. In 2010, Harris became the first African-American and first woman to serve as California’s attorney general. In 2016, she became the first Indian-American woman to be elected to the United States Senate. In August of 2020, she became the first Black woman and first Asian-American woman to appear on the presidential ticket of a major political party.



On Saturday, November 7, the Associated Press projected that former vice president Joe Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, won the state of Pennsylvania and have earned more than 270 electoral votes in the 2020 presidential election. Senator Harris can therefore add more firsts to her list:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/11/07/kamala-harris-makes-history-as-first-female-black-asian-american-vice-president/">she is officially the first female vice president-elect&nbsp;</a>in United States history and the first person of color to earn the distinction as well.



In her first public statement after the race was called—<a href="https://twitter.com/KamalaHarris/status/1325119592130252801" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a tweet</a>—Harris didn’t mention these firsts. “This election is about so much more than&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/JoeBiden" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">@JoeBiden</a>&nbsp;or me,” she said. “It’s about the soul of America and our willingness to fight for it. We have a lot of work ahead of us. Let’s get started.”



Harris’s presence in the 2020 race—both for as a candidate for president in the early days of the Democratic primary, and for vice president in the general election race—has been a potent reminder of what has been lacking in our nation’s highest office for more than two centuries.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“It&#8217;s a kind of beautiful, full-circle moment for the story of America because I think women, and more specifically Black women, have done so much work—and are sort of the backbone of this country—without the acknowledgment of the work that we&#8217;ve done,” says Alia Daniels, co-founder of the global queer digital media network Revry. “And so I think being able to see someone who looks like me, in one of those positions, it&#8217;s just a level of pride that I don&#8217;t even know if I can fully express.”</blockquote>



Daniels notes that because we’ve seen women attain powerful positions in the private sector over the past few decades—consider former Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi, or General Motors chief Mary Barra, to name a few boundary-breaking corporate leaders—it can be all too easy to take female leadership for granted. “But this is the highest position in our country that a woman has held,” she says. “There&#8217;s something to actually seeing it.”



The American public has already witnessed Harris asserting her expertise and authority on the national stage: her use of “I’m speaking” during the vice presidential debate last month was a master class in dealing with a male interrupter, and her questioning of then-U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions and now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh in Senate hearings in 2017 and 2018 were similar showcases of feminine confidence and capability. But her impending presence in the executive branch of government has the potential to be as instructive as inspirational.



“No one can deny the power of seeing somebody who shares an identity, like your gender or your race, which are so salient in American society, certainly, in a position of power,” says Colleen Ammerman, director of the Gender Initiative at Harvard Business School. Ammerman points to research that has shown how female role models and mentors, as well as mere exposure to portraits of female leaders, can help encourage women to speak up, stand up and perhaps achieve more. “The images of leadership and power that we see are overwhelmingly white and male. Sometimes we don&#8217;t even quite notice that until we see something different,” she says.



Henah Parikh, development and communications manager at She’s the First, a nonpartisan nonprofit devoted to fighting gender inequality through education, puts it this way: “You can’t be what you can’t see.” She points to research that shows that, without female role models, girls stop believing they can be anything they want to be as early as 5 years old. Women like Harris help combat that.



“We talk a lot about these women trailblazers, like Kamala Harris who are the historic first, but they&#8217;re also paving the way for pulling other girls and women up with them,” Parikh says. “And that&#8217;s what&#8217;s so important to me and to a lot of women, but especially for me as a South Asian woman.”



Senator Harris’s election to the vice presidency comes at a moment when a pandemic has killed more than 200,000 Americans and forced thousands more out of work. Women have been disproportionately affected: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 865,000 women dropped out of the labor force in September, compared to 216,000 men. The childcare and remote learning demands on mothers working from home stand to erase <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/women-in-the-workplace#" target="_blank">close to a decade</a> of gains for women in the workplace unless spouses, employers and the government work to find solutions and provide support.



Harris alone cannot fix this. But for Aimee Koval, cofounder and president of Metis Consulting, a B-corp and certified disability-owned enterprise that provides technology and management consulting, Harris’s experience as a daughter, aunt and stepmother makes her more qualified than previous White House occupants to understand the unique challenges facing women.



“For me the big impact of choosing a woman in the White House is that that comes with a perspective that I think that we haven&#8217;t seen enough of, or enough understanding at a federal level from lawmakers who have not taken those concerns into account have not addressed issues such as childcare and the funding of schools,” Koval says.



Koval notes that fairly or unfairly, all eyes will be on Harris when it comes to these issues; this level of scrutiny and pressure is one of the well-documented downsides of being a “first” or “only” within an organization. In the federal government, where Democrats have held onto their majority in the House but control of the Senate is still unclear, women like Cori Bush—the first Black woman&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/elanagross/2020/11/04/the-firsts-of-the-us-2020-election/?sh=3309ce521c89">elected to Congress</a>&nbsp;by Missouri—and the newly-reelected members of “The Squad” (Congresswomen Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib) can use their personal experiences and political sway to advocate for these policies, too. But the rates of women in government, even with&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/erinspencer1/2020/11/05/record-number-of-women-to-serve-in-the-117th-us-congress/">a record 131 women</a>&nbsp;so far elected to the 117th Congress, still lag that of the general public. The work is not over.



“I strongly believe that progress isn’t inevitable,” Harvard’s Ammerman says. “And I think it&#8217;s dangerous to sort of think, okay, we&#8217;ve broken one barrier and so we&#8217;ll just automatically keep going.”



Jackie Adams, coauthor of “A Blessing” and the first African-American female correspondent formally assigned to cover the Reagan and H.W. Bush White Houses for CBS News, has watched women vie for positions of power since Geraldine Ferraro was the first female vice presidential candidate on a major party ticket in 1984. Looking at the developments from the 2018 and 2020 election cycles, she finds reasons to be optimistic about female leadership beyond Harris’s fresh status as vice-president elect. “There are more women of color running for office than ever before,” she said. “I think that there is a flywheel that&#8217;s spinning and it might be pushed further ahead a little bit faster, [as] Senator Harris becomes vice president, but even if she doesn&#8217;t, it&#8217;s not gonna be stopped.”



The inspiration that Harris has already instilled in young girls is evident in the tweets and photos depicting Halloween costumes (<a href="https://twitter.com/meenaharris/status/1322297281333272576" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Converse and all)</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/ErinnFHarley/status/1313473405514125313?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1313473405514125313" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">driveway stump speeches</a>. But the significance of her election is not limited to the Gen-Z set.



“Senator Harris actually shares a birthday with my mom,” She’s the First’s Parikh says, going on to explain that both her mom and Shyamala Gopalan Harris come from South India, and both came to American with a lot to learn. Parikh describes hearing Harris talk so fondly about Shyamala and then texting her own mother.



“I said, ‘I just hope that you feel like you have seen some growth in this country, just by seeing this on television.’ Millions of Indian people around the country can relate,” she says. “It is something we&#8217;ve never ever experienced before.”



&#8211;By Maggie McGrath, Forbes Staff

Tag: US Election 2020

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