SPECIAL FEATURE
in Africa and frontier markets – and it doesn’t help when global governance standards become so overly strict that they become a serious constraint. A lot of commercial banks would rather not take such risks. It has a way of dampening risk appetite. OFQ : On the flip side, can you tell us more about the expansion of TDB Group across Africa? AT: We’re operating in a context where the continent is integrating. We have the African Continental Free Trade Area, where we’re moving more and more towards a common market approach. In that context, we’re looking to play more of a role in centers that we feel have a lot to o ff er in terms of trading with di ff erent parts of the continent. We’ve stepped into Senegal, Ghana and Botswana and we’re getting ready for other significant economies. We have our core markets, of course, but we also understand that connectivity adds value to our existing markets. OFQ: How important is the OPEC Fund’s partnership with TDB Group? How have our equity investments and funding boosted your work? AT: We’re very pleased with our strategic partnership with the OPEC Fund over the last decade, although our broader relationship goes much further back. The risk capital space has been valuable to us because we need to multiply our funding and leverage our existing capital. Scale and appetite are important and thanks to our strategic partnership with the OPEC Fund we’ve
supported their exports to the rest of Africa with hundreds of millions of dollars of related trade financing, including via blockchain technology to optimize those transactions in terms of time, cost and carbon footprint. We’re also working with many partner countries in the Gulf like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which are very close to the African continent. So we’ve thrown our weight behind the trade between those economies and markets within our member states. OFQ : What are your experiences of risk mitigation and risk transfer, especially when working with partners such as insurance companies? AT: We’ve always seen ourselves as a “rainmaker” by having larger facilities than just what we ourselves can contribute. We co-finance a great deal and try to crowd in as many risk-sharing partners as possible, so we can do more than just conventional balance sheet- based financing.
We have a long track record with Lloyds of London as one particular stakeholder group, but the World Bank Group’s Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) has also been a strong strategic partner in recent years. They’re enabling us to scale up and do more in an environment that continues to be characterized by shocks of all kinds, including rapid rises in interest rates that make the cost of access to finance very di ffi cult. The Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (BADEA) and British International Investment are two of our partners, among several others, that have stepped in and worked with us on risk sharing, both on a funded and unfunded basis, which enables us to do much more.
The African Continental Free Trade Area, established in 2018, has been ratified by 47 of the 54 signatory countries .
been able to boost our o ff ering to our clients and markets.
OFQ : How are you enabling South-South trade? Beyond financing fertilizer imports from Morocco to Ethiopia, what can you share of your work? AT: We’ve long focused on strategic sectors like agriculture and energy security, where we’ve promoted linkages between di ff erent African countries. Morocco is a key global African player when it comes to fertilizers, so we
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