It is a pleasure for me to address you today, some five years since the inaugural Africa Financial Summit that was held in Cape Town in 2012. At that time, George Abed1 noted the great progress that African countries had realised in stabilising their economies – a particularly remarkable achievement during a period of unprecedented global financial turbulence. However, he also cautioned that the prospects for continued growth in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) were contingent on greater economic diversification and on reducing dependence on commodity exports – an issue to which I will return later in my address.