On Tuesday, US Vice President Kamala Harris addressed thousands of young Ghanaians in Accra on women’s empowerment and visited the country’s coastal estate, which was the last stop for Africans sold in the transatlantic slave trade.
Her visit to Ghana is the first stop on a trip to Africa that will take her to Tanzania and Zambia.
Harris used the break to promise an American partnership, urge African countries to do more for women, and talk about the importance of learning difficult history, an apparent reference to recent pressure from Republicans to take some lessons from American classrooms cancel.
Speaking at the Black Star Gate, a memorial erected on the site where Ghana declared its independence from Britain in 1957, Harris said one in four people on the planet will be African by mid-century.
“Of course, that means that what happens on this continent has an impact on the whole world,” she said.
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Citing examples such as pioneering mobile payments in Kenya or drone delivery of health services in Rwanda before such services existed in the United States, Harris said innovation will be key to Africa’s future success.
Harris stressed the deep gender gaps in Africa and said the United States would work with African partners to close those gaps.
She was pleased to say that women’s economic empowerment would benefit not only themselves, but also their children, families, communities and the wider economy.
“America can also engage in digital inclusion, good governance and democracy,” Harris said.
She described the latter as a “work in progress” and involving her country, a clear reference to the turbulence in American politics and the elections of recent years.
Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff later toured a 17th-century slave fort on the Cape Coast, one of many coastal structures active during the transatlantic slave trade that forcibly displaced 12.5 million people from Central Africa and the West.
