The African Capacity Building Foundation and Afrexim have signed a partnership agreement to support intra-African trade.
The African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF) and the African Export and Import Bank (Afrexim Bank) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding, aimed at strengthening their collaboration on various capacity building initiatives in Africa. The agreement recognises the common areas interest in fostering sustainable capacity for African countries.
In signing this MoU, the two institutions agree to join efforts in supporting inter-African trade, by strengthening institutional capacity for export development, building capacity for research, policy formulation and implementation of think tanks. Private sector organisations in the targeted countries will also be included in the focus areas, in order to uncover innovation in effective economic integration, intra-African trade and export development.
ACBF has extensive experience working on Africa’s developmental challenges and has an established regional network of partners that are able to carry out capacity development programs in a sustainable manner. For its part, Afrexim Bank is an African regional institution that provides trade finance facilities to promote intra-African trade and to encourage African countries to trade internationally. By partnering to mitigate country risks in Africa, the two institutions will create synergies, through joint support for economic policy analysis and management and other capacity development initiatives.
ACBF and Afrexim Bank are complementary in contributing to the mitigation of country risks, as the bank provides country risk guarantees to enhance the credit of African borrowers, whereas ACBF contributes to better economic policy formulation and management on the continent.
Speaking at the MoU signing, held on the fringes of the AfDB annual Meetings in Arusha, Tanzania, ACBF executive secretary, Dr Frannie Léautier highlighted that ACBF would make its current portfolio, as well as its pipeline of capacity development initiatives in Africa available to Afrexim Bank in order for the bank to consider co-financing programmes and projects of mutual interests.
“By working together to enhance capacity in African trade finance, this collaboration will not only improve the management of trade finance, but there will also be a knowledge management aspect to the partnership, through the joint organisation of seminars, workshops and other knowledge sharing events for public sector and among umbrella private sector organisations. A key output will be the publication of a Journal of Trade.”
Speaking at the signing ceremony, Mr Jean-Louis Ekra, president and chairman of the board of Afrexim Bank said that the agreement underpins the bank’s strategic focus on leveraging partnerships, in order to complement and supplement ongoing efforts at addressing human resource capacity gaps on the continent. He highlighted that “through strategic partnerships and collaboration, our two institutions will be able to create the necessary synergies for the creation of the requisite human and institutional capabilities to support economic growth and development in Africa, by leveraging and pooling our individual technical expertise.”