South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has called on developed economies to help rebuild Africa after the pandemic by allocating more International Monetary Fund reserves to the continent.
Africa needs more than $ 33 billion set aside for the continent to support coronavirus-ravaged economies, Ramaphosa said in an interview with the Qatar Economic Forum on Monday.
“We need more because our economies will need a lot of support, and that’s fair,” he said. “The continent is growing by leaps and bounds and needs to get that kind of support because we all need to get out of this economic downturn that Covid-19 has brought us.
The IMF is preparing to give its member countries the largest resource injection in its history – $ 650 billion – to boost global liquidity and help emerging and low-income countries cope with rising debt and Covid-19. French President Emmanuel Macron has called on other rich countries to follow suit and commit to redistributing some of their so-called special drawing rights from the IMF to help increase Africa’s share.
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva expects the fund’s board of directors to vote on the proposed new SDRs by mid-August.
Sub-Saharan Africa’s gross domestic product shrank by 2.4% in 2020 and is likely to increase by only 2.8% this year, compared to the forecast for expansion of 7.7% in Asia and 3.9% in Europe, according to the World Bank. The UN Economic Commission estimates that rebuilding Africa from the pandemic will cost $ 400 billion.
In addition to the increased share of SDRs, African countries also need debt relief and additional support for those countries facing delayed payments, Ramaphosa said.
“Without this support, Africa will be abandoned forever,” he said. “We can get up and move on with our own shoe straps, but we need this lift and developed economies to have a duty.”
Vaccination programs
The availability of additional funds would help speed up Covid-19 vaccination programs in Africa, where countries do not have the financial or organizational capacity to negotiate their own supply deals with pharmaceutical companies. On the same subject : Elbit Systems wins Spanish Army radio deal. Slow deployments have been exacerbated by institutions and countries that oppose patent exemptions, which would allow for more decentralized vaccine production, Ramaphosa said.
“We see their refusal to give up this intellectual property provision that they have as part of vaccine nationalism, and we just don’t understand the point of it all,” he said. “There must be an exemption for a period of three years to enable countries that have the ability to produce vaccines.”
While countries such as the United States and Britain have completely inoculated about 45 percent of their population and the European Union about a quarter, only 2.8 percent of Africa’s 1.1 billion people have been vaccinated, according to the World Health Organization.
“Prolonged refusal leads to inequalities in vaccines,” Ramaphosa said. “We are facing an emergency situation that has affected the whole world, and it is completely unfair and completely unfair that pharmaceutical companies, as well as some countries, refuse to allow this provision to be repealed so that there can be mass production of these vaccines, so yes we can save lives. ”
© 2021 Bloomberg
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