African leaders used the second day of a summit with French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday to push for easier access to credit that could help fund major investments and boost economic growth.
A years-long campaign by African governments for reforms to reduce their borrowing costs got a boost on Monday when Macron said he supported creating a first-loss guarantee mechanism to de-risk investments on the continent and would lobby for the idea at the G7 summit next month.
African governments argue they suffer from an unduly high perception of risk among lenders, which can make credit prohibitively expensive.
“The issue … is not liquidity. It is risk architecture,” Kenyan President William Ruto said in remarks to the Africa Forward Summit in his country’s capital Nairobi on Tuesday.
At Macron’s invitation, Ruto will attend the G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains, France and hopes to build momentum this week for proposals he can take there.
More than 30 African government leaders as well as heads of multilateral financial institutions and business executives from across Africa and France are attending the Nairobi summit, the first France has held in an English-speaking country.
France aims to use the event – which Macron said had mobilized 23 billion euros ($27.01 billion) of investments in Africa – to develop new partnerships in Africa after seeing its influence fade in former colonies in West Africa.
Esther Ndu
