AfDB: Assets Managed by African Institutions to Double by 2020

Assets managed by African institutional investors are expected to nearly double from about $ 634 billion currently to $ 1100 billion Horizon 2020, affirmed, Friday in Casablanca, the general manager North Africa of the African Bank of development (BAD), Mohamed El Azizi.

The opportunities of investments, carrying interesting returns, are numerous and progressing in North Africa, said Azizi during the presentation of the Africa Investment Forum (AIF), scheduled for Johannesburg from 07 to 09 November 2018.

He stressed, however, that these opportunities are failing to attract interest of institutional investors and global corporations, explaining that to address these challenges, AfDB is launching the AIF, which is a platform transactional, multi-stakeholder, and multi-sectoral, designed to mobilize all actors to remove the obstacles that hinder the financing of investment in Africa.

For Mr. Aziz, the AIF will also deploy all the means to change the false perception of risks, linked to investments in Africa, explaining that this initiative offers a concrete response to the challenge of financing development that Africa faces.

He recalled that Africa needs to mobilize substantial investments over the next decades, to accompany rapid population growth, urbanization, and ever-increasing demand for goods and services.

Governments and Multilateral Development Institutions (MDBs) Can not Fund Themselves these needs, which makes it necessary to widen the circle of partners, in which the private sector he added, "and to play an even more active role."

For his part AfDB Director of the Syndications and Client Solutions Department, Olivier Ewek indicated that the next AIF, designed and managed by AfDB, represents an opportunity to stimulate the economic transformation of the continent

The AIF is intended to be a multi-stakeholder and multidisciplinary platform dedicated to supporting project appraisal up to their funding stage, raising capital and speeding up closure

ADB Resident Representative Leila Mokadem, for example, said the AIF aims to build the African investment market, where the African Development Bank, as well as its partners, will help to select and improve the projects, to attract co-investors, to structure, facilitate and especially to concretize the transactions.

LNT with MAP