African leaders called for wide-ranging debt relief and a flood of climate finance to help the continent boost its electricity generation from renewable sources almost sixfold by 2030, Bloomberg News reported. In a declaration signed by leaders at the inaugural Africa Climate Summit in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, they called for the tenor of sovereign loans to be extended, debt pauses when climate disasters strike and a 10-year grace period on interest payments.
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Resources Per Country
- Angola
- Benin
- Botswana
- Burkina Faso
- Cameroon
- Central African Republic
- Chad
- Congo
- Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo)
- Cote d'Ivoire
- Djibouti
- Equatorial Guinea
- Eritrea
- Ethiopia
- Gabon
- Ghana
- Guinea
- Kenya
- Liberia
- Madagascar
- Mauritania
- Mauritius
- Mozambique
- Namibia
- Niger
- Nigeria
- Rwanda
- Senegal
- Seychelles
- Sierra Leone
- Somalia
- South Africa
- Sudan
- Swaziland
- Tanzania
- Uganda
- Zambia
- Zimbabwe
Ghana agreed to terms to swap about $4 billion of domestic debt, taking another step toward meeting its obligations under an International Monetary Fund bailout, Bloomberg News reported. The results imply Ghana achieved about 95% target under the latest three debt exchange deals. The country’s Eurobond maturing in 2032 declined by 0.2 cents on Wednesday to 43.7 cents on the dollar. Notes maturing in 2051 dropped by a similar amount to 42 cents on the dollar.
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Kenya’s central bank reopened a sale of treasury bonds offered last week in a move aimed at keeping a lid on financing costs after investors demanded higher yields, Bloomberg News reported. The Central Bank of Kenya said Tuesday it would seek to raise 21 billion shillings ($145.4 million) from a tap sale of the two-year and five-year treasury bonds sold on Aug. 16. The auction comes after the central bank pushed back at investors demanding higher yields at its auction last week as it allotted only 19 billion shillings out of 53 billion shillings tendered for its debt sale.
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Kenya is in talks with the World Bank and European Union to ramp up its “Hustler Fund” project that is already providing cheap credit to more than 20 million of the country’s poor, Bloomberg News reported. A top government official said the World Bank was discussing backing that could amount to as much as 20 billion shillings ($139 million), including via an existing program to support small enterprises. Combined with investments from the Treasury, this could leverage lending of 200 billion shillings over the next five years.
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Nigeria's suspended central bank governor Godwin Emefiele will appear in a high court in Abuja on Thursday, when he is expected to enter a plea in a 20-count indictment, a government lawyer said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Government lawyers, on Tuesday, said they had filed additional graft charges against the governor, including allegedly "conferring unlawful advantages" and "unlawful procurement".
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Nigeria's central bank has reported a $7.5 billion loan from U.S. banks JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs in financial statements published for the first time since 2015, sending the country's international bonds tumbling on Friday, Reuters reported. Nigeria's government has had to seek overdrafts from the central bank to plug a widening deficit amid wide-scale theft in the oil industry, and the large foreign loans could add to the central bank's burden.
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Kenya's interior ministry said on Wednesday that it had suspended the local activities of cryptocurrency project Worldcoin while government agencies assess potential risks to public safety, Reuters reported. The project founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman launched last week. It requires users to give their iris scans in exchange for a digital ID, and in some countries users also get free cryptocurrency as part of plans to create a new "identity and financial network".
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Ghana’s central bank surprised financial markets by raising borrowing cost to a record high to speed up a deceleration in inflation, Bloomberg News reported. The monetary policy committee lifted the rate to 30% from 29.5%, Governor Ernest Addison told reporters in the capital, Accra, on Monday. Only three of 13 economists in a Bloomberg survey predicted an increase. The cedi stayed about 0.3% weaker after the announcement to trade at 11.48 per the dollar by 12:32 p.m. in Accra.
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The International Monetary Fund approved almost $1 billion for Kenya, saying the East African country had met conditions for continued financing under programs to help reform the economy and confront challenges posed by climate change, Bloomberg reported. Kenya got a $415 million disbursement under the Extended Fund Facility and Expanded Credit Facility, programs designed to shore up its economy and boost its foreign exchange reserves, following a fifth review.
Ghana's finance ministry has invited eligible holders to exchange $809.9 million in domestic U.S. dollar bonds for a package of new bonds with lower rates and longer maturities, it said on Friday, Reuters reported. The country's cocoa board launched a debt securities exchange programme on the terms of the government's exchange memorandum, under which it is inviting holders of its short-term debt securities to voluntarily offer to exchange their Cocoa Bills for longer-term debt securities.