The President of the Afreximbank, Prof. Benedict Oramah, told the Financing Investment and Trade in Africa conference organized by the Tunisia-Africa Business Council in Tunis that Afreximbank’s vision was to leverage $1 billion in support of FEDA’s mission and to catalyze four times that amount in FDI in five years.
Oramah explained that the kind of equity funding currently available in Africa was not appropriate for turning the continent into the trade hub which it needed to become in order to achieve desired growth, adding that FEDA would ensure that investors’ investments were protected under the immunities and privileges available to Afreximbank and that the investments enjoyed tax privileges and incentives.
The report by Nigeria’s Vanguard newspaper on Monday quoted Oramah as saying that development finance institutions are market failure institutions that existed to complement what markets were unable to offer or that begin to create markets, explaining that, as a result, Afreximbank’s interventions were based on the philosophy of bringing additionality, rather than displacing commercial banks.
It added that Oramah said that Afreximbank was making it possible for financing to come into Africa.
According to him, the Bank has just expanded its guarantee offering to make it more accessible to companies coming into Africa, including through its Intra-African Investment Guarantee Facility.
It had also introduced Mansa, a customer due diligence platform, which will help to address the challenge of many African countries not being able to access trade finance due to high compliance cost.