Experts and officials during the two-day Aswan Forum for Sustainable Peace and Developmen asserted the importance of multilateral finances and the private sector in mobilising finances for climate action across Africa.
The multilateral finances are provided by international financial institutions’ (IFI)
They also urged the international community to fulfil its commitment to provide developing countries with $100 billion in finances per year to adapt and deal with the climate crisis.
The third edition of the forum was held under the theme ‘Africa in an Era of Cascading Risks and Climate Vulnerability: Pathways for a Peaceful, Resilient, and Sustainable Continent’ and organised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cairo International Centre for Conflict Resolution, Peacekeeping, and Peacebuilding in partnership with the Swedish government and the African Development Bank (AfDB).
In a recorded message, Mahmoud Mohi El-Din — Egypt’s climate champion, special envoy on financing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and the executive director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — said that there is no room to talk about global political cooperation while there are regions suffering from food crises, climate change vulnerability, and conflicts like the ones in Africa.
He also noted that the war in Ukraine, along with the COVID-19 pandemic, have deepened the troubles the continent is beset by, especially that its countries need to spend around 35 percent of their GDP to invest in water, food, and infrastructure amid the ongoing challenges.
Africa’s financing needs in this regard edged up from $2.2 trillion to $2.4 trillion amid the ongoing challenging time, he said.
“The COP27 is a platform through which Egypt will adopt a local and regional approach for the development of the continent,” he said, calling for availing the room for the private sector and multilateral finances provided by IFIs to mobilise finances in this respect.
Mohi El-Din also touched upon the sustainable debt issue in the continent, which is aggregated by the impacts of both the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“If creditors cannot introduce a solution to deal with this issue, all efforts of investing in the continent’s water, energy, and food security will be at risk. We have to work on channelling the required finances for the continent’s development from the private sector as well as IFIs to achieve Africa’s SDG Agenda and the ‘2063 Africa We Want Agenda’”, Mohi El-Din explained.
