Africa’s largest bank, Standard Bank, trading in Ghana as Stanbic Bank, has launched the third edition of its Stanbic Bank Africa Trade Barometer (SB ATB).
The report leverages the bank’s presence and expertise across the continent to address the information vacuum of reliable African trade data and to support and enable the growth of intra-Africa trade.
Speaking at the launch of the report in Accra, Head of Business and Commercial Banking at Stanbic Bank, Farihan Alhassan, said the report is borne out of the bank’s desire to have up-to date data for African businesses to help them thrive.
“Free Trade Availability of trade data remains a challenge across Africa and the Standard Bank’s Africa Trade Barometer aims to fill part of this data gap through up-to-date survey data on the views of African businesses on the environment they operate in, their trade behaviour, trading activities and their perceptions on trade.
“Africa is our home; we drive her growth and knowing how important businesses, especially MSMEs are in driving growth on the continent, we decided to produce this report to provide cutting edge data and insights to businesses to guide their operations and decision making. And now that the continent is set to fully implement the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCTA), it critical that we have up-to-date data for businesses to rely on.”
Farihan Alhassan
The SB ATB was launched in 2022 with the intent of creating Africa’s leading trade index to address the information vacuum of reliable African trade data and to support and enable the growth of intra-Africa trade.
SB ATB Focuses on 10 Countries
The SB ATB focuses on 10 countries – Angola, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. Seven broad thematic categories are trade openness, access to finance, macroeconomic stability, infrastructure, foreign trade, governance and economy, and traders’ financial behaviour.
Being Africa’s largest bank, Standard Bank (trading in Ghana as Stanbic Bank) has leveraged its presence and expertise across the continent to create the Stanbic Bank Africa Trade Barometer. The SB ATB was launched in 2022 with the intent of creating Africa’s leading trade index to address the information vacuum of reliable African trade data and to support and enable the growth of intra-Africa trade.
Availability of trade data remains a challenge across Africa and the SB ATB aims to fill part of this data gap through up-to-date survey data on the views of African businesses on the environment they operate in, their trade behaviour, trading activities and their perceptions on trade.
In order to construct the SB ATB index rankings, seven broad thematic categories of data are collected from both primary and secondary data sources. These thematic categories are trade openness, access to finance, macroeconomic stability, infrastructure, foreign trade, governance & economy and traders’ financial behaviour.
From a primary data perspective, the Stanbic Bank Firm Survey Trade Barometer (SB STB) is constructed. The SB STB scores and ranking by country are the averages of all the data collected only from the primary research surveys conducted with over 2,500 businesses across the 10 countries of interest.
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