Afreximbank’s Board of Directors has decided to make available to African countries a fund of 4 billion dollars, to enable them to mitigate the shock of the war in Ukraine on imports of cereals and oil.
This fund, called the “Ukraine Crisis Adjustment Trade Financing Program for Africa” (UKAFPA), aims to “enable African countries importing cereals and petroleum products to cushion the price shock caused by the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, due to supply disruptions”.
“I am delighted that our Board has approved the introduction of UKAFPA, demonstrating once again its responsiveness to the needs of African Member States and their citizens. This initiative will go a long way to averting the anxiety and social unrest that could arise from impending food shortages and high costs of fertilizers and petroleum products,” said Benedict Oramah, Chairman of Afreximbank.
“Afreximbank has once again shown the way forward in enabling the continent to tackle the impact of the crisis head-on, through financing solutions tailored to the specific challenges faced by our member countries,” he said. for his part Macky Sall, the Senegalese president.
According to the board of Afreximbank, “requests from African countries to benefit from these funds have already reached 15 billion dollars”.
Several African countries, like The Gambia, “need revenue from tourism to sustain their economies. However, energy price increases in major European economies are reducing the share of the budget reserved for leisure spending, a constraint that arises as the world is just emerging from the confinements linked to Covid-19”.