It was outlined during the meeting which gathered Finance Ministers of African countries and Governors of Central Banks of the various sub-regions of the continent in Morocco last July 6th.
The African Caucus brought together last Wednesday in Marrakech (Morocco), for two days, Finance Ministers and Central Banks Governors of the 54 African States, members of the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to adopt, a declaration in which it urged Bretton Wood institutions for a “rapid”, “comprehensive” and “substantial” debt relief to help Africa recover from the twin crises linked to Covid-19 and the conflict in Ukraine and also, to mitigate the risks to growth prospects.
The participants in this two-day meeting under the theme “Towards a resilient Africa” stressed the need to ensure the rapid implementation of the commitment made at the G7 Summit (June 2022), relating in particular, to the urgent need of improving multilateral frameworks for a debt restructuring and to face the challenges of debt vulnerabilities.
They also called on the Bretton Woods institutions (BWIs) to quicken work on a global debt architecture and to support the region’s call to the G20 for an extension of the Debt Service Suspension Initiative ( DSSI), which provided a roadmap for further debt relief or restructuring for African countries facing growing debt vulnerabilities.
Participants also urged the BWIs to accelerate reforms that should support the extension of eligibility to heavily indebted middle-income African countries, the suspension of debt service pending negotiations as well as the transparency of loan conditions and contracts.
Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors of the 54 African WBG and IMF member States specifically call on the Bretton Woods Institutions to apply their debt policies flexibly to financially constrained countries, to increase support for strengthening debt and public investment management capacities, developing national capital markets, combating illicit financial flows and tax evasion, while strengthening the financial institutions.
It is also about exploring the possibility of converting debt into investment programs in order to enable countries to access additional financing mechanisms without increasing their level of indebtedness, and to help Africa accelerate structural reforms induced by the crisis, they said.
