By Spy Uganda
Kampala: The Coordination Committee for Economic Cooperation with Sub-Saharan African States (AfroCom) intends to open the Russian Business Support Center in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, Committee Chairman Igor Morozov said at the Russia-Uganda Business Forum.
“Today we will for the first time make a presentation of the AfroCom trading house as the center for support of the Russian business in Kampala, Uganda. We want to make our experiment exactly in this capital and create a model of this center, to understand how we will support the Russian business, the midsize and the small one, from regions, which is ready to come to Africa and unlock all its capabilities, including the creation of its enterprises and localization,” Morozov said.
“This is Uganda, in the first instance,” he added.
AfroCom was created in 2009. The key task of the committee is to promote the interests of the Russian business in Africa.
While launching AfroCom, Vladimir Padalko noted that the Committee consists of 140 member companies and organizations. The Russian companies are working in cooperation with AfroCom and Business councils in Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan and other African countries.
Russia’s Interest In Africa
It will be simplistic to frame the previous Russia-Africa summit as a copy-cat jamboree organized by Russia to latch on the bandwagon of the increasingly fashionable trend of organizing and institutionalizing Africa summits by countries like China, India, Japan, France, and the United States.
The truth is that, since the 2000s, there has been a noticeable re-awakening of Russia’s interest in Africa. Indeed, between 2005 and 2015, Africa’s trade with Russia grew by 185 per cent, and Russia has several reasons to engage Africa more intensely and now Uganda seems to be in Moscow’s target.
