Adesina Hails $78.8bn Investments Boost For Africa In 2 Years
Finance Minister Ahmed tasks AfDB on job creation
BY COBHAM NSA – Over $78.8 billion worth of investment interests found their way into Africa in the last two years courtesy of African Development Bank (AfDB).
The President of AfDB, Dr Akinwumi Adesina, who stated this at his second term inauguration on Tuesday, explained that the investments were mobilised “through the innovative and groundbreaking Africa Investment Forum in 2018 and 2019”.
Adesina said under his leadership in the last five years, the Bank’s impact was felt across the continent with its presence visible and expanded to 44 countries, including some fragile states.
According to him, that period also had the institution delivering “more for women with the implementation of the Affirmative Finance Action for Women (AFAWA), to leverage $3 billion for women and women businesses”.
Adesina, while pledging to build a much stronger and resilient bank to deliver greater quality impacts on African people, said the vision is to consolidate on past achievements woven around impressive results on its High 5s project.
The High 5s of the bank are: Light up and Power Africa; Feed Africa; Industrialize Africa; Integrate Africa; and Improve the Quality of Life of the people of Africa.
He said the focus is to have: 18 million people with access to electricity; 141 million people had access to improved agricultural technologies for food security; 15 million people with access to finance from private investments; 101 million people with access to improved transport from infrastructure; and 60 million people with access to water and sanitation.
Adesina, in his second term inauguration speech during a virtual ceremony of the swearing-in on Tuesday in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, stated that the project implementation would be done with the leadership and capacity of the bank, while remaining financially strong and sustainable.
Furthermore, he said over the next five years, AfDB would focus on institution, people, delivery, and sustainability, adding that; “Each of these is encapsulated in the following five areas which combine with the programmatic High 5s to transform the development landscape of Africa.”
AfDB’s mission is to “Build a stronger institution; strengthen human capacity; enhance effectiveness; deepen quality and impact; and maintain financial sustainability.”
The re-elected AfDB boss said the Bank’s High 5s were developed to accelerate the delivery of the Ten-Year Strategy, and “have been implemented with deliberateness, speed and rigor”.
Noting that the High5 programmes have so far “impacted 335 million people”, Adesina expressed happiness the institution’s non-sovereign operations for the private sector increased 40% from $1.5 billion in 2015 to $ 2.1 billion in 2019, with the highest level of $ 2.5 billion achieved in 2016.
On future plans and working with the Board of Directors to achieve set goals, Adesina said “the bank will pay increased attention to supporting Africa with quality health care infrastructure, and building on its comparative advantage in infrastructure”, adding that work “will focus on economic infrastructure, quality physical infrastructure and quality health infrastructure.”
For him, the COVID-19 pandemic has opened up “new opportunities and a greater sense of urgency to build up Africa’s manufacturing capacity, industrial development, and critically needed industrial value chains, that must be supported by enabling infrastructure and policies”.
Consequently, he said “special attention will be given to regional industrial value chains and the strengthening of financial markets in order to expand intra-regional trade and competitiveness, and boost the Africa Continental Free Trade Area.”
While admitting huge challenges ahead such as poverty, inequality, fragility, high youth unemployment, significant infrastructure financing gaps, and sustainable debt management, Adesina said going forward, the bank “will expand partnerships, financial partnerships, knowledge partnerships, and investment partnerships.
“Stronger inclusive partnerships with civil society, academia and knowledge centers of excellence. We will reach out and tilt more global capital towards Africa – joining investment hands across the globe to support the needs of the continent”, he added
Speaking at the event, Nigeria’s Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Mrs Zainab Ahmed said AfDB must have learnt relevant lessons from the recent experience and should therefore work to strengthen the institution from this experience.
She also urged all stakeholders, member-countries, the Board of Directors, senior management and staff to join hands and work together towards pushing AfDB onto greater heights of achievement, delivery and efficiency in the interest of Africa.
Challenging the continental bank to step up efforts in helping African countries create jobs for its youth populace, Mrs Ahmed said this has become imperative since governments cannot do it all alone.
“We truly need this in order to address the problems of unauthorized migration and extremism across the continent”, the Minister said.
