Thursday, November 4th
9:00 - 10:30
*Note: Please meet in the green room 30min prior to the session start time to be mic’d up
About the Africa Investment Forum:
Africa Investment Forum 2022 is the continent’s largest transactional investment marketplace. It brings together deal sponsors, deal brokers and deal makers from around the world. This year’s Market Days event will be the first face-to-face gathering since 2019.
Launched in 2018 by the African Development Bank, AIF provides investors with access to a deal platform, offering bankable and de-risked projects with strong support from Africa’s leading development finance institutions. It is this transactional focus that distinguishes AIF from other African business summits. In addition to the public plenaries and the panel sessions, there will be private boardrooms that focus on specific deals at the Market Days.
Session Description: Sports as a Business Catalyst
Africa’s sports industries are attracting increasing interest from local and global investors. The sports sector has enormous potential as a global business driver, frequently serving as a gateway to other investments on the continent, including infrastructure, and providing growing opportunities for franchising, brand rollout, and media deals. Indeed, the continent has many characteristics of a powerhouse sports market: a growing and increasingly middle-class population offers a potential untapped audience for domestic sport leagues and the global African diaspora also creates a global market opportunity. Still, promoting sports as a catalyst for business necessitates creating an enabling environment in the form of investment-friendly policies, a pro-business legal framework, tax breaks and incentives, to ensure sport becomes a catalyst for business and economic activity.
Session Goals:
- Discuss the state of Africa’s sports industry and recent high profile transactions
- Outline the opportunities for and impediments to commercialization
- Discuss how governments and DFIs can propel the sports industry as an engine for economic growth
Session Format:
This is a 90-minute session, consisting of a moderated panel discussion. 15 minutes will be reserved at the end for Audience Q&A. The panel will be one lively conversation with a moderator who knows the topic instead of a set of sequential monologues. Answers and interventions should be short and example-rich, with everyone speaking in sentences rather than paragraphs. Long introductions will not be made for panelists as full bios and background information is available to the audience.
Moderator:
- Victor Oladokun, Senior Advisor to the President of African Development Bank Group
Panelists:
- Masai Ujiri, President, Toronto Raptors
- Didier Yves Drogba, Didier Drogba Foundation
Questions for Discussion:
- What is your experience with the power of sports? How is sports transformational?
- How is the business and investment side of the sports industry growing? How are you seeing the appetite from international investors?
- Where are the opportunities for commercialization? What are the major impediments?
- How do governments and African DFIs support the growth of the sector?
- What is the role of the global African diaspora in driving growth?