Expert of the Center for African Studies commented on the results of SPIEF-2024 on the air of Radio Sputnik

On June 8, 2024, Vsevolod Sviridov, an expert of the Center for African Studies, gave an interview on air for Sputnik Radio.

During the broadcast, he expressed the following ideas:

At SPIEF 2024, there was a traditional Russia-Africa business dialogue. The Forum has been held annually since 2016, already such a traditional event.

“On its first day, a Russia-Africa conference called “Water is more precious than gold” took place. Experts discussed the problems of water security on the continent, so Africa became more on the agenda, this is an important step,” - comments Vsevolod Sviridov.

There were a lot of guests from Africa at SPIEF, all of them very high-level. Zimbabwe’s President Mnangagwa participated in the plenary session yesterday. The Prime Minister of the Central African Republic, the second person of Sudan, a large number of ministers, including the Minister of Economy of São Tomé and Príncipe, the Minister of Mines of Sierra Leone and other high-level African guests participated in the Forum.

“One of the positive trends in Russian-African cooperation is that we have finally given up the endless talk that Russia is only getting back to Africa, that we need to do more. Dialogue is becoming more and more specialized. Separate sectoral tracks are appearing. A separate energy track, a separate IT track. And, of course, the future of Russian-African relations lies behind such sectoral initiatives and sectoral approaches.

Not many agreements were signed at SPIEF. But I would like to note that the HSE University signed an agreement with Innopraktika to work on projects in the area of digitalization of public administration. We are also working on cooperation in the field of food security, education, transfer of skills, technologies and competencies,” said Vsevolod Sviridov.