By Moses Patience Chat
Global development financiers attending this year’s Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) Fund’s forum in Vienna, Austria, have pledged a strong commitment to remodeling their investments to support green projects at scale.
The delegates representing multilateral development banks and intergovernmental institutions at the forum advised that business and political leaders must do more to stimulate capital deployment from the private sector.
African Development Bank Group President, Akinwumi Adesina, also called for new ways of project preparation and de-risking of projects to mobilize private sector investment at scale for sustainable development.
“We’ve got where the private sector is. We’ve got US$ 145 trillion of assets under management (and) by 2026 it’s going to be there… but the issue here is that we need new ways of aggregation to prepare the projects, to de-risk the projects, and lower the transaction cost for those deploying capital,” Adesina reiterated.
The African Development Bank chief also referred to the Africa Investment Forum, initiated by the Bank and seven partners, as a leading continental platform that is aggregating bankable projects to reduce fragmentation and make it easier to attract institutional investments.
” The Africa Investment Forum has become today the premier investment platform to do anything on investment in Africa, and in the last four years, we have been able to leverage about US$ 142 billion of investment interest into energy, water and sanitation, infrastructure, and transport corridors,” Adesina said.
He added that the African Development Bank and its partners are also creating opportunities for the private sector to invest in agriculture through special agro-industrial processing zones, which are being established across the continent.
Adesina said: “We are bringing in private capital into agriculture that will create opportunities for the private sector to go into rural areas close to where the farmers are producing – they can buy food, they can process food, they can package food, they can export food and have a greater competitiveness for various value chains.”
The Director-General (DG) of OPEC Fund, Abdulhamid Alkhalifa, also highlighted the need for development financiers to remodel their operations to attract other resources to close the huge financial gap.