En Direct : Brazzaville, assemblées annuelles de la BAD 2026

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:04]The third perception system Africa Thank you very much. Uh the vice president, you need you need to speak in English or in French or in Arabic?

[00:00:36]>> French.

[00:00:37]>> English.

[00:00:38]>> I'm getting back in French.

[00:00:40]>> Gala, it's up to you. Okay.

[00:00:50]Bankvelopment opportunity.

[00:01:02]Actarantee.

[00:01:32]Africara institution public multilateral Africability African development African African development.

[00:03:00]Please guarantee guarantee.

[00:03:27]Africad economic.

[00:03:49]risk warfare, no intelligence, no competence, no resource or service. There is king.

[00:04:38]Digitalization.

[00:04:50]We need to move forward.

[00:05:27]So, let me now turn to Mr. Emanuel Moses who is the um CEO of ATD. So um what would it take to unlock the insurance sector's potential as a source of long-term development capital and how should it connect to the broader financial system?

[00:05:48]>> Thank you. Thank you madame uh uh for that uh question and um again I would like to congratulate the bank for putting this excellent panel to try and discuss all these very important matters. As my brother Yamay has already described, uh in the financial architecture of uh Africa, there is a need to integrate guarantees as one vehicle uh that could help to mobilize financing. I would like to thank the two governors who have already spoken and u they lead by example. uh in my organization. I can thank the government of uh the central bank of DRC for recognizing a tidis guarantees for a long time and that has helped us to use our d-risking instruments to cover bank exposures in DRSC. So well done to DRC.

[00:06:51]I also want to thank the BD BDSC also for granting us a similar approval whereby they've given us a a risk waiting that allows banks that are lending to all these productive sectors to do more because we have given our uh risk guarantees. So thank you to the governors publicly. I want to thank you and I'm encouraging other central banks in the room to do the same because that's how we create a financial architecture that recognizes insurance and guarantees as part of the ecosystem.

[00:07:27]Uh now coming back to the question of what should we do about the insurance sector because we have this paradox that uh has been well articulated by President Cidi to say we have this paradox of $4 million trillion dollars of assets and savings in the continent and yet we are saying Africa is capital poor. No I think Africa has the resources they are sitting in in treasury bills. they sitting in pension funds. We want to see how we can tap into that. So the core would be the regulators that manage pensions savings should do take the lead from central banks who are here to say they should also put regulations that allow for those savings to be trans transported transfigured transformed through guarantees of course into the productive sectors. So a similar type of recognition is required that we can now tap into these savings and transform them into productive sectors. In terms of of course the the logic has already been described by my brother here without the guarantor companies like ourselves for gas FSA who are highly rated. It is very difficult to con convince regulators that the savings or the patients of of our population are safe. So we need recognition and we are ready to deploy our tools to tap into that. I think the bigger message here is that Africa needs to finance itself first and then Africa will then call the rest of the world to finance Africa. But we have the resources. If we rearrange ourselves under this NAFD architecture, surely we can really move the needle. So this is my my appeal and my my my submission. Thank you madam. Thank you very much Mr. Khaled Dugajio. Mr. Khaled Dugajjo is the co-chair of the US Africa practice of the uh law firm the LA Piper. So Mr. Gajou, what are the most binding legal and regulatory regulatory bottlenecks to deep integrated financial systems in Africa? and what practical reforms would most quickly derisk investments?

[00:09:54]>> Thank you. Thank you, Assatu. Um, yes. Uh, I think I am one of the few who would be not speaking on behalf of one particular institution.

[00:10:05]We as a private practitioner, we advise, you know, government DFIs and corporations.

[00:10:14]uh I had the opportunity to serve the bank in the past. So I'm very much familiar with the instrument of the African Demon Bank as well as other institution. Generally speaking, what we hear from private sector why some investors are hesitating to come to Africa. They they say lot of things.

[00:10:34]Some of them are true, some of them not true. But basically they they one of the constraint is the regulatory and the legal constraint. regulatory in the sense that at the central bank level they they operate on the basis of certain type of constraint in terms of liquidity coverage ratio which means they they they don't put enough resources for long-term use in project finance which takes 10 15 20 years so there there are these bottlenecks and some of them are actually from international institution like Basel Accord which also reinforced these kind of uh credential ratios. So there need to be some discussions about how to improve that that kind of uh uh constraints at the level and that is true for sovereign fund because most of these funds are they the main objective preservation of the of of the resources rather than investment. So as a result, so these I mean throughout the the the this this annual meeting you've heard Africa had close to four trillion dollars but they are not available.

[00:11:44]they're not available because they are stuck into all kind of constraints legal and regulatory and also if for instance Africa were able to authorize municipal financing that would be helpful because obviously municipal financing is generally used for water for instance waste management some of these these infrastructure in most of countries are financed out of municipal bond but in Africa with a few exception it's not permitted to to use municipal financing. municipal financing.

[00:12:18]Therefore, it's a tool and it's constrained that then of course generally speaking what we hear is that the perennial the perennial rule of law and and when foreign talk about rule of law in Africa they basically targeting three to four element they're saying that if you invest in Africa the legal regime is not always stable because some most of the time you sign a contract you have certain number of provision especially especially from the fiscal regime and it happened to change and that lead to litigation and litigation is very expensive. So stability of the contract is very important. The second issue is also some level of predictability on the judicial obviously if decisions are not predictable it is very difficult to know really how to measure your risk.

[00:13:12]Therefore that is that's again a constraint. Finally, we also have clients who have actually gone through judicial process who won cases but cannot collect. So enforcement is a major issue again in Africa. Not only it's difficult to go to the court but if you go to the court even if you win sometime you cannot enforce. So these are some of the constraints. Now also we observe that in most of infrastructure project there are models that are used PPAs and concessions they're not always adequate because as you know most of most of the infrastructure project actually generate resources in local currency so and then they have to reimburse in foreign exchange. So you know lawyers of course we we craft the agreement so that we have like a foreign account. So central bank will step in I my two uh predecessor in colleague will know I mean the difficulty to get you know approval of establishing foreign exchange account in outside the country.

[00:14:21]So these are some of the problem and now of course the solutions are there. One of the solution is the word has been used fragmented. So therefore the the the contrary to fragmented is unified.

[00:14:34]There are certain number of unions in Africa like Yumoa you know Bak and other region and I think this is the way to go because in one market like Umoa market you know every country can borrow so you can have a crossber transaction you can mobilize resources in terms of banking and I think again uh the chairman or the governor mentioned that if you get a license in one country you don't need another license in another country so these are really practical solution and I think it can work only if there are further and more unified market. The the the last but not least I think my two predecessors spoke about it. The perception of risk in Africa is not justified but it is real. It is there.

[00:15:22]So therefore we have to deal with it.

[00:15:25]One way to deal with it is precisely to offer them certain type of guarantees and insuranceances. Therefore, I think the role that and and it's not a surprise that the president of ADB is specifically mentioning ITD is that because I think an institution like ITD if properly funded could actually mitigate a lot of risk in Africa and therefore increase funding. So I I think that's one of the solution and FAGAS is is is equally uh participating in the same scheme. So I would just stop here and just say that this is really what I think you know from a private practice.

[00:16:03]Thank you.

[00:16:04]>> Thank you. Um thank you very much. Let me now turn to you professor Carol Lopez who is the honorary professor at the Nol Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town. Professor Lopez, the structural reforms needed to strengthen Africa's financial systems are well understood yet implementation remains slow. What is the most important political economy obstacle standing in the way and how can it be overcome?

[00:16:40]>> Uh thank you as I think the points that have been made by my predecessors here in the panel particularly Mr. schedule are excellent. And I think uh if we try to understand the structural reasons why we are still debating these issues all the time because you know the issues of risk we debate all the time the fact that we have 4 trillion has become a bit more prominent in the debate but we have always said that we needed to mobilize more domestic resources and we needed to have more efficient fiscal machineries and so on. All of this is not completely new. What is now missing is to go a bit into the granular details of what needs to happen. And some of the points have been mentioned here, but I wanted to dig a bit deeper. For instance, let's take the bank of international settlements basel.

[00:17:38]I think you know they have been created basically to deal with the crisis of subprime.

[00:17:46]So what happened is that unintentionally we derisk Africa out of the global banking system because we wanted basically to deal with a problem through credential rules that are more robust.

[00:18:04]But then we basically created a penalty for Africa in liquidity. That was not the intention but it it is what is happening and the reason is because we are not really sitting at the table most of these times >> where these issues are discussed because we tend to be so concentrated on ODA and concessional lending that we don't deal with the structural issues and I don't think it is any plot sometimes just not being present and we need to be uh really cautious that A lot of these issues do require a different approach of partnership and a different discussion alto together and I think we have to be a bit more uh specific on what the entry points are and the entry points is the BIS committees, the bank of international settlement committees. Are we really having a proper participation there is the financial stability board?

[00:19:06]is the uh OECD export credit arrangements that sometimes undermine all the concessional facilities that we receive elsewhere and uh and things like that. So the credential rules uh we we we tend to deal with them the same way we deal with trade. We behave because for us to be considered as good students we we behave when others are throwing the rule book.

[00:19:37]Uh so they create the rule book they throw it out but we are the ones who are supposed to follow. uh if you are it's no longer the case on a structural adjustment program you had to deal with let's say 100 something policy reforms uh and then you know when you end at the end of those reforms if you are lucky you you really don't get liquidity as a result of it because the structural problem has not been addressed so this is this is this is the dilemma that we have and I think because we have that dilemma. We we kind of have a hidden tax and this hidden tax is not interest rates.

[00:20:20]That's the that's the appearance of it.

[00:20:22]It's sort of the tip of the iceberg. The hidden tax is volatility pricing is the fact that our unpredictability. point that you are making. Our unpredictability has been ingrained in the way we deal with Africa and our macroeconomic policies as good as they have done to tame inflation as it was just mentioned for Republic of Congo, they are geared towards just meeting external obligations, not to deal with our own structural transformation. And by just being focused on one aspect not the other we end up being you know sort of uh incapable of dealing with the structural dimensions such as this Eden tax. Ed hidden tax is where it's the foreign currency volatility.

[00:21:11]It's the refinancing risk. It's the legal uncertainty.

[00:21:16]It's the liquidity risk. It's the exit risk. It's all these things. these risks that we we kind of put in the bag as you know just a given and we don't deal with each one of them then we have this sort of hidden tax that comes as a result and I think uh basically Africa is not paying for capital scarcity I think uh we are paying for the absence of predictability and unless we deal with the predictability we'll continue to tackle the wrong you know sort of target and I think this is this is really one of the major problems and guarantees will will go a long way to address some of these problems and I think it has been uh understood very correctly as one of the priorities another one is how we deal with the rating agencies and this is not an ideological debate we should not go there and say oh we don't we don't like the rating agencies that is not producing ing any results. Neither, and this is a personal opinion, is it for us to create an African Union rating agency. That is also not going far. It's not going to produce results because the market doesn't react, you know, with emotions or even less with obvious political positioning.

[00:22:41]An obvious political position, yes, it's there. But obvious, no, they don't accept. So the common critique that we have that the rating agencies are biased is correct. But what we really need to to to discuss with them is what metrics are they using. Some of them are pretty known and transparent to a point but there is a lot that is subjective that needs to be discussed too. That is the part we have to concentrate on. So let's have a framework that is acceptable for us to enter into this type of discussions and I think this uh controversy between African and Fitch is actually helping because it's demonstrating the limits of the current approach and I think it's demonstrating also that there is a lot of hidden concepts that don't make any sense but then we have to go a bit further and I think we have to be more sophistic isticated in our critique. Uh for instance, we have to try to understand why is it that we are always structurally penalized in procyclical uh moments. So you have a crisis, you have a shock, you have not produced it.

[00:23:56]It's like Liban brothers or the war in in in the Gulf or whatever. So we have the first shock and then we have the second shock which is all the evaluation of risk is rear mirror. It's looking at not your potential but what has just happened. So you have a second shock but this second shock is not given to everybody. That's why Ukraine will be treated very differently from Burkina.

[00:24:24]See so we have to engage in that type of sophisticated discussion. different matrix, different ways of looking into procyclical. So it's we are not going to gain by just being sort of viferous with proclamations.

[00:24:40]We need to be more specific. And I think that's the the task before us. New financial architecture, new African financial architecture. Next step, what is it? It's to identify these granular elements that are going to unleash the potential because they are going to deal with the real constraints. These constraints that you know as Gaju was saying are structural. For instance, the fact that the mandates of a pension fund is impeding them from actually putting the money where we are saying they should. But let's deal with that mandate. And why is the mandate there the way it is constructed? Part of it is because of return. So let's prove that the returns are possible elsewhere. That is an instrument. It's not because of a project. You go there and try to sell a project, you are not going far. It has to be an instrument. So I think the discussion has to mature and uh some of the contributions that have been made demonstrate that we are getting there.

[00:25:44]So now it's a it's a matter of just keeping this momentum going. Thank you.

[00:25:48]>> Thank you.

[00:25:49]Thank you very much. Thank you. So, let me now turn to you Cedric Monticho who is the chief of business development and he's today representing his excellency Abdullah al- Muli, the president of Bada. So, um Bada has co-inanced major African development projects alongside the Islamic Development Bank, the Saudi fund, the OPEC fund and others. So, what does the Arab coordination group's experience teach us about mobilizing long-term development financing for Africa at scale?

[00:26:28]>> Thank you very much. Um, I have the privilege to represent as you say the his excellency the president of Bada during this panel and uh our experience in mobilizing that capital for Africa is through one word is partnership. We have made partnership not an aspiration but a method of work. and in Rwanda in uh in um Kivvoir in uh Sineagal for the rapid train uh and in other geographies we pull capital together with our Arab coordination brothers, the Abu Dhabi fund, the fund of Qatar, the Saudi fund, the Islamic Development Bank, the Arab Monitary Fund, uh Obada of course and uh the Arab fund for economic and social development. So all these funds uh that we pull together assist us to make the project rapidly implemented pull up uh substantial capital align due diligence items so that the government or the stakeholders do not face several and uh conflicting and different paperwork. So this method has assisted us to uh to be successful over the 50 years of uh our work and I am also privileged to see in the panel that uh we have regionalized our presence uh in term of strategy we are shareholders or co-shareholders to in the uh development bank of central Africa bed here uh based in Brazil so we are co-shareholder with uh the central bank we uh in an an alliance where we comm committed $200 million in to help the the the the guarantee funds uh to to to to deepen the guarantee uh product towardmemes.

[00:28:28]So this was an initiative that we've done with uh Fagas, AGF uh and the like.

[00:28:35]And uh I'm also uh happy to say that we work closely with ATD uh also here to to assist. So some of the institution receive seat capital from from from us.

[00:28:50]We increase the capital of of the development bank in each geographies.

[00:28:55]The the the central one the the development bank of West Africa of southern Africa uh the development of East Africa. So this is the the method that we have found successful uh over the years.

[00:29:10]>> Thank you. Thank you very much uh you know for this very rich discussion. So uh maybe because we're running out out of time but I'm going to challenge you four words. [snorts] Four words not more.

[00:29:37]So what single commitment from governance institutions or partners would you most want to see acted on before the next annual meetings forwardsvelopment Professor visibility an example economy negative.

[00:30:55]the Africa.

[00:31:08]Mhm.

[00:31:22]Diversification.

[00:31:49]Perfect.

[00:31:53][laughter] [laughter] Madam reform existence.

[00:32:34]Madame President African.

[00:33:04]Thank you, >> Mr. Moses. Four words.

[00:33:10]Going to see the winner today.

[00:33:15]>> Let us mobilize more domestic capital for Africa.

[00:33:22]>> Great. We're getting there, Mr. Gajio.

[00:33:26]>> That's difficult for a lawyer, but >> yes, lawyer. It's complicated. You >> tend to speak a lot. um more integration >> more integration >> clearly that's very important >> okay >> the second thing is we have to address those regulatory constraint and I think Mr. Lopez has gone into the granular level and I think that that's one of the problem. So we definitely need to fix it because we say we have lots of money but it's not available. Why?

[00:34:02]>> Thank you.

[00:34:02]>> We have to enforce our laws and we have to reduce the perception of risk through the guarantees.

[00:34:11]>> Thank you Professor Lopez. Four words.

[00:34:14]>> Tough tough but I will say a sentence instead.

[00:34:20]No country develops sustainably on the basis of others balance sheet.

[00:34:29]Okay. [laughter] uh Arab [clears throat] Africa Arab partnership within NAFA that's four Arab Africa partnership through Bad within NAFA through uh AFGB.

[00:34:50]>> Thank you. A warm round of applause for our panelists. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for your time and thank you for your patience. Bonaratus.

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[00:36:42][music] [music] [music] [singing] [music] Alle [singing] [music] [music] [singing] [music] [singing] hallelujah. [music] >> [music] [music] [music] >> Sim morning. [singing and music] I need [singing] a darling.

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[00:39:50][music] [music] >> [music] >> Alhamdulillah.