Guest of honour at the recently held Africa Factbook International Stakeholders Consultative Conference, Vice President Constantino Chiwenga said that project is fundamental in the mental emancipation of Africa.

“The lack of facts about Africa tends to adversely affect planning and monitoring of projects, tourism, as well as exploitation of trade and investment opportunities. In some cases, data is just not available. Perhaps this is because most African knowledge is not documented. Whenever it is, the story in most cases would have been written by non-Africans based on non-African sources,” said Chiwenga.

Get paid to write app reviews

He added that the publishing of African Factbook will enable Africans to own their story and guard against inputs based on interests that are not African.

“The narrative about our unique heritage must be constructed more by our collective knowledge about ourselves than by that of others. The African Factbook project presents us with a great opportunity to present and promote an Afro-centric view of African phenomena as an alternative to the predominant biased and stereotyped views about Africa,” he added.

Chiwenga highlighted that book should serve as a one-stop-shop for data about Africa, with much potential for improving the ease of doing business and reducing its cost,” he said.

“To ensure that African Factbook positively impacts the lives of ordinary Africans across the continent is therefore worthy of praise and greatly to be supported as recognised and acknowledged by the AU Commission as reflected in Article 25 of the Resolution of a meeting of its Specialised Technical Committee on Communication and ICT in Addis Ababa last year.”

The African Factbook project is being implemented by the Book of African Records on the strength of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Africa Union.