By YANGE IKYAA

More stakeholders are signing up for the first aviation, cargo and export conference in Nigeria, the “Chinet Lagos Conference 2021,” which is billed to hold from August 25 to 26, 2021 in Lagos.

This is according to the organizers of the event, ATQNews, a global Pan-African travel news organization, stressing further that the conference was long overdue.

The organizers also said that “Nigeria, which is a country with over 200 million resourceful people depends a lot on imports, and this has been eroding the nation’s wealth. A lot of airlines bring freighters daily to Nigeria and most of them fly out empty and there is therefore a need to change this dysfunctional scenario.”

They also noted that “Nigeria needs to export more and aviation should be the key to increasing exports.”

This prompted ATQNews to come up with an annual conference that will bring all potential exporters, cargo managers, logistics firms, airlines, airports, customs and everyone in the aviation and cargo ecosystem to chart a pathway that enables Nigerians to export more.

The event has already earned support from the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) and Ethiopian Airlines Cargo, along with many airlines, logistics and global financial service companies, and its organizers insist that “as the importance of oil wanes, the value and volume of non-oil export should be growing and aviation should be driving it.”

The forthcoming conference, which will have an exhibition part, will be broken into 3 parts over 2 days, namely aviation, cargo and exports. The aviation aspect will have a presentation and panel discussion on airlines, airports and aviation.

Experts, including airline CEOs, past airport CEOs and aviators will discuss the reasons why airlines and airport systems have not delivered the best possible outcomes for aviation in Nigeria. The second section on cargo will be on presentations and panel discussions on the cargo and logistics value chain, the challenges of scale and the opportunities available, while the third part will be on exports.

The specific themes of discussion will focus mainly on how to scale-up Nigeria’s export capacity, and how to remove impediments and improve the nation’s access and market penetration globally. There will also be a support session on “Insurance and Financing of Aviation, Cargo and Export in Nigeria.”

Since 1935, aviation has been growing in Nigeria, and with so many airlines and airports operating in the nation’s airspace, it is expected that aviation should and would contribute more to the nation’s economy.

At the end of the 2-day event “we will be leaving the event with enough knowledge about the current aviation situation in Nigeria and its role in growing the economy by driving bigger cargo export from Nigeria. With this understanding of the cargo and export systems in Nigeria, we can integrate our systems by networking and learning from each other, as problems shared eventually become problems solved” said Mr. Ikechi Uko, the publisher of ATQNews, and organizers of Chinet Lagos Conference 2021.