Uhuru urges new ways for financing Africa’s Covid-19 recovery
By PSCU, May 19, 2021
PSCU
President Uhuru Kenyatta has proposed new approaches to financing of Africa’s Covid-19 recovery efforts, saying the private sector should be supported to play a more central role.
Alongside private sector participation, the President advocated for enhanced recovery packages from Africa’s development partners, debt swaps and restructuring, and accelerated access to alternative sources of financing such as the Green Climate Fund.
“Innovative financing solutions that crowd in the private sector. These would include issuance of private sector-backed financial instruments such as green bonds, supporting the issuance of local currency instruments, structuring guarantees to lower financing costs and developing and deepening public-private partnership opportunities,” the President proposed.
The President spoke at State House, Nairobi, on Tuesday in his virtual address to the summit on financing of African economies hosted by President Emmanuel Macron of France, and attended by several leaders among them President Felix Tshisekedi of DR Congo, also the Chairperson of the African Union.
In his address, President Macron called for a change of tack in financing African development by enhancing the Special Drawing rights to boost the continent’s capacity to combat Covid-19 pandemic as well as recovery efforts.
The summit called for the lifting of vaccine patents to allow their manufacture on the continent, French President Emmanuel Macron said.
“We are asking the WHO, the WTO and the Medicines Patent Pool to remove all these constraints in terms of intellectual property which blocks the production of certain types of vaccines,” Macron said at the end of the summit attended by African leaders and officials from global financial institutions.