The Africa Investment Forum has concluded plans to discuss and advance 45 deals worth $57.4 billion in its third edition meeting scheduled for next month.
The 45 boardroom deals are projected to create a total of 3.8 million jobs, both direct and indirect.
The Africa Investment Forum is a multi-stakeholder, multi-disciplinary platform that advances private and public-private-partnership projects to bankable one, raises capital, and accelerates deals to financial closure.
The eight founding partners are; the African Development Bank (AfDB), which is also the host; Africa 50; the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC); the African Export-Import Bank; the Development Bank of Southern Africa; the Trade and Development Bank; the European Investment Bank; and the Islamic Development Bank (IDB).
The AfDB said in an open session, the Africa Investment Forum provided progress updates and previewed five deals.
These included: an investment to develop over 220 km of electric transmission lines under a long term public-private partnership agreement; a project with a 10-year goal to roll out broadband infrastructure to over 800,000 residential and small business customers; and a project for the establishment of a biomedical and pharmaceutical hub.
According to the AfDB, “the 45 boardroom deals are projected to create a total of 3.8 million jobs, both direct and indirect; of these, one million jobs will go to African women and women entrepreneurs, and another one million to youth.”
Following the presentation at a two-day meeting by the Forum’s founding partners, the Africa Investment Forum Senior Director, Chinelo Anohu said, “there’s an energised commitment to push the Africa Investment Forum forward.”
She stated that in addition to investments, the Africa Investment Forum was working to support an enabling environment across African countries, noting that “Good policies make good investments.”
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Earlier, heads of the founding partners had met to discuss developments and strategic areas of focus over the coming year.
The 160 participants in the meeting, representing investors and project preparation organisations, included Sarah Whitten of the United States Trade and Development Agency; Preeti Sinha, the Executive Secretary of the UN Capital Development Fund, and Omar Ezzat of the Multilateral Cooperation Center for Development Finance.
African Development Bank President, Akinwumi Adesina stressed the importance of prioritising Africa’s health care security and health sovereignty, based on three pillars: building quality healthcare infrastructure; developing the continent’s pharmaceutical industry; and increasing the capacity of vaccine manufacturing.
Adesina said he expected many of the Africa Investment Forum founding partners to play a role in the Alliance for Green Infrastructure initiative of the African Development Bank, the African Export-Import Bank, the African Union Commission and AUDA NEPAD.
The Bank chief commended the heads of partners for coming together swiftly in 2020 to launch a unified response to COVID-19, which was announced during the last founding partners meeting.
“Going forward, we need to work more closely together to accelerate the pace of investments in infrastructure,” Adesina urged.
Alain Ebobissé, head of Africa 50, cited the acceleration of capital flight during the pandemic and reiterated the need to galvanize domestic resource mobilisation.
“The partnership, which was announced February 18 during the EU-AU Summit, will raise up to $500 million of early-stage project development and project preparation capital to catalyze bankable, greener infrastructure projects at scale and speed,” AfDB said.
Other topics of discussion included the role of the African Continental Free Trade Area in developing regional markets and Africa’s energy transition.
The AfDB pointed out that the Africa Investment Forum has brought 10 deals with a value of $3.1 billion to closure, and currently has 136 deals with a total value of $87.52 billion in its portfolio.
Representatives of the initiative announced that the Forum’s boardroom sessions, a key component of the Africa Investment Forum market days, will hold virtually next month, following a postponement of its third edition late last year owing to the emergence of the Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus.
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