As Kanayo Awani remembers it, the seeds of a continental shift in intra-African trade were sown from the moment the immediate past president, Benedict Oramah, assumed leadership of Afreximbank in 2015.
"If you listened to his speech at his inauguration," recalls Awani, executive vice president at Afreximbank's Intra-African Trade Bank, "he must have mentioned intra-Africa trade over 20 times. You could glean from that that he was going to, under his leadership, prioritise intra-Africa trade."
At the time, intra-African trade was a marginal concern and not on the frontburner at the bank.