The Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa, or Badea, is making billions of dollars of funding available to nations in the south of the continent to help promote integration and industrialisation, the lender’s president said.
Badea has already invested more than $2 billion in the Southern African Development Community’s 16 member states and has now raised another $6 billion from institutions in the Arab Coordination Group that they can tap, Sidi Ould Tah told reporters in Harare, where SADC is gathered for the annual heads of State summit.
Owned by 18 Arab countries, Badea began operating in 1975 and aims to strengthen economic, financial and technical cooperation between Arab and African states. It relocated its headquarters to Riyadh last year after civil war broke out in Sudan. Badea has capital of $20 billion and commits a significant portion of its lending to infrastructure.
According to Tah, the bank wants African countries to be able to develop without having to raise additional debt and is working with sovereign wealth funds in its member states to invest in private business in the continent.
“We will spare no effort to bring the needed capital to the region in terms of equity, in terms of soft loans, in terms of technical-assistance grants and in terms of trade financing to make it easier to develop the cross-border trade as part of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement,” he said.
SADC Executive Secretary Elias Magosi said the region is seeking funding support for infrastructure, including in areas such as energy.
“We are going to showcase projects today, infrastructure projects primarily, because those are the ones that facilitate this integration that we speak about. You can’t industrialise without energy, for instance, and that’s where our partnership with Badea is critical to expedite our infrastructure development,” Magosi said.
Bloomberg (additional reporting by newZWire)
