African leaders used the second day of a summit with French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday to push for easier access to credit that could help fund major investments and boost economic growth.<\/p>\n
A years-long campaign by African governments for reforms \u200bto reduce their borrowing costs got a boost on Monday when Macron said he supported creating \u200ba first-loss guarantee mechanism to de-risk investments on the continent and would lobby for the \u2060idea at the G7 summit next month.<\/p>\n
African governments argue they suffer from an\u00a0unduly high perception of risk\u00a0among \u200blenders, which can make credit prohibitively expensive.<\/p>\n
“The issue … is not liquidity. It is risk architecture,” Kenyan President William Ruto \u200bsaid in remarks to the\u00a0Africa Forward Summit\u00a0in his country’s capital Nairobi on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
At Macron\u2019s invitation, Ruto will attend the G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains, France and hopes to build momentum this week for proposals he can take there.<\/p>\n
More than 30 African government leaders \u200bas well as heads of multilateral financial institutions and business executives from across Africa and France are attending \u200bthe Nairobi summit, the first France has held in an English-speaking country.<\/p>\n
France aims to use the event – which Macron said had \u200cmobilized \u206023 billion euros ($27.01 billion) of investments in Africa – to develop new partnerships in Africa after seeing its\u00a0influence fade\u00a0in former colonies in West Africa.<\/p>\n
AFRICAN COUNTRIES WANT REFORMS TO HOW CREDIT RISK IS ASSESSED<\/strong><\/p>\n U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres noted that African countries face borrowing costs that are twice as high on average as advanced industrialized economies.<\/p>\n “That is not a \u200bmarket verdict on Africa. \u200bIt is a verdict \u2060on the injustices of the system,” he told the summit.<\/p>\n Decrying what they say are biases against them that overstate the continent’s risk, African governments have called for changes \u200bto the methodologies used by credit ratings agencies.<\/p>\n Major agencies including S&P Global Ratings, Moody\u2019s \u200band Fitch reject \u2060accusations of regional bias, saying their ratings are based on globally applied, publicly disclosed criteria.<\/p>\n Macron’s proposal of a first-loss guarantee mechanism would help boost capital flows into Africa. It is part of a broader push to mobilize private capital \u2060for African \u200bnations as rich governments cut back on development financing in favor \u200bof defense and other domestic priorities.<\/p>\n While other G7 nations have voiced support for making global financial institutions more responsive to African needs, the \u200blevel of support for specific proposals is unclear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" African leaders used the second day of a summit with French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday to push for easier access to credit that could help fund major investments and boost economic growth. A years-long campaign by African governments for reforms \u200bto reduce their borrowing costs got a boost on Monday when Macron said he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20844,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":7,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":{"format":"standard","override":[{"template":"1","parallax":"1","fullscreen":"1","layout":"right-sidebar","sidebar":"default-sidebar","second_sidebar":"default-sidebar","sticky_sidebar":"1","share_position":"top","share_float_style":"share-monocrhome","show_featured":"1","show_post_meta":"1","show_post_author_image":"1","show_post_date":"1","post_date_format":"default","post_date_format_custom":"Y\/m\/d","show_post_reading_time":"0","post_reading_time_wpm":"300","post_calculate_word_method":"str_word_count","show_zoom_button":"0","zoom_button_out_step":"2","zoom_button_in_step":"3","show_post_tag":"1","show_comment_section":"1","number_popup_post":"1","show_post_related":"1","show_inline_post_related":"1"}],"image_override":[{"single_post_thumbnail_size":"crop-500","single_post_gallery_size":"crop-500"}],"trending_post_position":"meta","trending_post_label":"Trending","sponsored_post_label":"Sponsored by","disable_ad":"0","source_name":"Reuters","subtitle":""},"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":{"view_counter_number":"0","share_counter_number":"0","like_counter_number":"0","dislike_counter_number":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,2362,33],"tags":[164,290,111,1395],"class_list":["post-20843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-east-africa","category-featured","category-politics","tag-emmanuel-macron","tag-france","tag-kenya","tag-nairobi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20843"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20843\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20845,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20843\/revisions\/20845"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}