The year 2020 has been an amazing year for HR&S and we are grateful for every achievement and every challenge to learn from. HR&S is blessed with a team of 50 ambitious, intelligent, professional, loving, and caring team members! Imagine! Please allow me to deeply appreciate EVERYONE. On behalf of our partners, let me THANK EACH and EVERYONE for your achievements during 2020. HR&S is doing well, and we are really so very grateful to be able to state this, what we need to do now is only one thing, we need to… SCALE!

During the year we have strengthened the RISE Centres and our team of coaches and auditors in Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Togo, and Uganda. We have also negotiated a new Centre in Burkina Faso. We have also strengthened the relationship between HR&S and Action10 by streamlining. The HR&S ambition is, as we all know, to empower researchers, innovators, and social entrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). In line with our own ambition and core-values are we happy to acknowledge the successful conclusion of the negotiations of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), and the launching trade deal on 1 January 2021. The trading phase under the AfCFTA was signed by 54 of the 55 countries in Africa; Eritrea has not yet joined. Thirty-four of those countries have ratified it as of early December 2020. “We want to move Africa away from this colonial economic model of perpetually being an exporter of primary commodities for processing elsewhere,” the trade bloc’s secretariat Wamkele Mene told the Financial Times. “We want to stop approaching tariffs as a tool for revenue. We want tariffs to be a tool for industrial development.” Africa has historically had low internal trade. In 2017, intra-African exports were 16.6% of total exports, compared with 68% in Europe, and 59% in Asia. In brief, AfCFTA will create a single market for goods and services. The trade agreement, which will cover a market consisting of 1.2 billion people and a combined GDP of $3 trillion. The largest free trade area since the development of the World Trade Organization, by a number of participating countries. The deal could help to realise more than $84 billion in untapped intra-African exports, according to a new report by the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank). AfCFTA has the potential to increase intra-African trade by over 50%, according to the UN Economic Commission for Africa. HR&S acknowledges the challenges mentioned by the member states;  including lack of modern and efficient infrastructure, unclear information about processes, barriers for women-led businesses, the economic destruction brought on by Covid19, and that some fear that large economic gains made in the diverse economies will be unequally distributed. In HR&S we recognise the need and benefits of moving away from a colonial economic model, the obvious opportunities that will be released as well as the challenges pointed out by the African leaders. These are the same frame-work within which HR&S is operating.