IMF Helping Africa Through the Crisis
I believe that Africa’s needs must be fully reflected in any global response to this unprecedented recession. With similar intentions, leading policymakers and stakeholders in Africa gathered in Tanzania last March to discuss how to work with the IMF on this. Under the leadership of President Kikwete and IMF Managing Director Strauss-Kahn, the participants agreed to build a new, stronger partnership.
More than just rhetoric, these common goals included the IMF seeking more resources for Africa and reacting more rapidly, responsively, and flexibly. While much remains to be done, I think it is a fair to say that we have achieved a remarkable amount on both fronts—more in fact than I could have imagined when I started in my job just a little over a year ago.
My colleague, Hugh Bredenkamp has done a fine job detailing the IMF’s response to the needs of low-income countries. In this post, I would like to talk a little about what it all means for Africa.
Sorting cashew nuts in Tanzania
As a reminder, the IMF agreed to mobilize $17 billion through 2014 for lending to low income countries, mostly in Africa—trebling our lending capacity to these countries. This goes far beyond the promise given by our Managing Director in Tanzania to seek a doubling of concessional resources. The financial terms of IMF support have also become more concessional, with zero interest until the end of 2011, and will remain more concessional thereafter.
And the IMF has moved quickly to deploy these resources in Africa. Among international institutions, it has an extraordinary capacity to react early to a country’s needs, as I know from my own experience as a policymaker in my home country of Liberia. Indeed, in the first eight months of 2009, we committed over $3 billion in new resources to countries in sub-Saharan Africa, trebling the total stock of outstanding commitments this year alone.