The Social Connectedness Index Trade Platform provides unique and easy trading opportunities amongst African countries under the African Continental Free Trade Area.
The Co-creation Hub said this in a statement to Financial Street on Wednesday to announce the launch of the SCI Index.
According to CcHUB, the index measures trade opportunities that exist between two countries, based on their social connectedness index, distance, trade flows, trade value and language spoken.
It also reveals latent possibilities of goods and services a country can export and import to and from connected countries, as well as the estimated value of the commodities, while traders can possibly view the value of trade between countries.
“Additionally, the platform contains information that can guide a user and inform trade decisions such as top commodities that can be traded between the countries (ranked by export value in 2018), SCI, distance between the countries, interconnected countries, country GDP, exchange rate, country region, trading blocs, total commodity demand, total commodity supply, market opportunity and country competitiveness,” it also stated.
The CcHUB and iHub Chief Executive Officer, ‘Bosun Tijani, added, “ We strongly believe that social connectedness can facilitate trade flows by alleviating informal trade barriers previously discussed in literature – contract enforcement frictions and search costs due to information asymmetries.
“As such, we built an index that presents an immediate opportunity for trade flows under AfCFTA across Africa using social connectedness data from Facebook and trade flow data from across Africa.”
