The African Development Bank alongside Islamic Corporation for the Insurance of Investment and Export Credit (ICIEC), African Trade Insurance Agency (ATI) and GuarantCo, on Wednesday entered into a Memorandum of Understanding for a Co-Guarantee Platform (CGP).
This initiative, the first of its kind and being promoted by the Bank, was signed on the first day of the Bank’s inaugural Africa Investment Forum in Johannesburg.
The Bank and its partners created the Co-Guarantee Platform for Africa, an innovative and collective de-risking instrument, to address the perceived high risk across the continent and the lack of capacity of traditional lenders to provide risk mitigation products for projects.
The platform is intended to increase the volume of insurance and guarantee solutions available to project sponsors and their bankers in a market-responsible manner.
The objective is to mobilize greater amounts of investment that would otherwise not take place in the region in the absence of affordable risk mitigation products.
The Platform is expected to enhance the relevance of the respective institutions’ instruments in the Region by implementing joint risk mitigation transactions.
Speaking about the Bank’s rationale for the Platform, Akinwunmi Adesina, President of the African Development Bank Group said, “There are many guarantee providers that can offer various types of credit enhancement and risk mitigation instruments in Africa, but cooperation among them has been either non-existent or on an ad hoc basis. Hence the need for a more formal collaboration among guarantee providers to maximize the use of their products in Africa.”
Dr. Bandar M. H. Hajjar, the President of the Islamic Development Bank Group, and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Islamic Corporation for the Insurance of Investment & Export Credit (ICIEC), noted that ICIEC, as a multilateral institution has a strong footprint in Africa with 23 member countries from within the continent, and has been actively mobilizing insurance and reinsurance capacity from the international market for Africa for the last 25 years.
ICIEC intends to avail its services, expertise and network to cooperate with the participants of the Co-Guarantee Platform, in order to structure collectively innovative risk mitigation solutions that will help to facilitate and mobilize funding capacity for medium and long tenor projects in Africa.
