 I hope, but if I can't, I'm going to speak faster than I normally do. So thanks a lot to all the three presenters for discussing this really important topic on long-term capital markets in Africa. They've actually touched on really interesting aspects, basically the pension funds, role of sovereign wealth funds, and even capital market development. What I will do, and I was asked, like, it's not necessarily I'm going to say, oh, you didn't have this right or that figure right, you know, taking up, picking up, nitpicking on all the three papers, I'll actually give you a little bit of more policy perspective. So what are the policy challenges in mobilizing long-term capital in Africa and give you some solutions from some of the work that UNECA has been doing as well. But before I go on, I just want to thank two young professionals from WTO who very enthusiastically helped me on this presentation to put this together. So I really wanted to acknowledge them. So very first question is why should we care about mobilizing long-term capital financing in Africa? I think some of the answers were given by a moderator at the beginning, but let me still go through it, actually. So we know that Africa is, and we heard it actually in Hanan's presentation and even Konal mentioned in the morning, Africa is not on track to meet any of the sustainable development goals. It has progressed on 15 out of 17 of the goals, but the progress hasn't been enough to actually get there. By 2030, only seven years are left. Africa has done pretty good on some of the people-related goals when it comes to good health and well-being education, but it has regressed on climate change and peace, justice, and institutions, which we know currently what's going on on the continent, not in favor of achieving it by any chance or even reversing the trend. And last but not the least, actually, some progress has been made in terms of making data available, but the data hasn't been good enough in order to actually make informed policy decisions. So this is the problem. I mean, like, we are not on track. Africa is not on track to actually achieve the sustainable development goals, but the bigger problem is that it has huge financing gap. So some of the numbers are put together from different studies that have been done. So Africa, on average, needs an additional $850 billion for the well-being of its people. It needs additional $300 billion every year in order to take care of the planet, and $183 billion actually to recover from COVID. All this adds up to a staggering $1.3 trillion. And if you look at the historical averages, Africa generally has been able to generate about $800 billion from savings, FDI, and ODA, which leaves a financing gap of about $500 billion. And that's a pretty significant amount of money if you come to think of it. And that's why we really need, and I think some of the issues that, you know, why we need capital markets basically because we need long-term development of Africa. And for this, we need actually capital markets. Other papers have already sort of brought out the points about pension funds and sovereign well funds and some of these other aspects. So let me actually quickly turn to some of the domestic, some of the problems we face both domestically as well as some of the challenges in the international financial markets. So just to give you a quick recap, more than 90% of the assets in the financial sector are held in retail and commercial banks, which means not too many opportunities for very long-term development aspects. Stock markets are underdeveloped, only 28 African countries tend to have stock exchanges that are not very deep and broad. Debt markets, and some of these things have actually, I'm going very fast because these things have been brought up in some of the presentations before as well. Issues, issuance of sovereign bond by all the African countries together is less than 30% of what's issued by China alone. We know about the macroeconomic volatility, which also leads to very low confidence by the international investors. So basically you don't attract too much capital there as well. And then there's limited options for long-term investments like infrastructure bond options. That can really help in terms of not only attracting long-term capital, but also investing in infrastructure gap, which we know is very, very huge in Africa and that if it's actually closed, it can spur long-term economic growth. Last but not the least, commodity exchanges are underdeveloped. They are small and underdeveloped, which means that for most of the time, most of the agricultural producers or producers of mineral resources, they have to go to the international markets to get the prices of their goods, which means they are generally price takers as well, which also inhibits their chances of actually getting a fair price for their goods. So now these are some of the domestic challenges that Africa faces, but there is also some international challenges. For instance, look at the very first figure where developing countries have their external public debt, public debt has actually gone up, which only means that, you know, they're more exposed to external shocks. Second big thing that has happened on the international financial sort of market is the developing countries rely more on private creditors than the usual traditional creditors that they have been, which actually points to two things. One, the borrowing costs are much higher for these countries. Plus restructuring debt has become a little bit more complex. That's the second downside of actually having these private creditors. Third, Africa. If you look at the third picture, Africa pays a lot more for its borrowing compared to because it has higher risk premium on it. So that means it actually pays a lot more in servicing its debt than spending on some of the long-term development needs. If this wasn't enough, then there is also a little bit of a sort of unbalanced picture on the international financial side. Africa, developing countries in general, in Sub-Saharan Africa in particular, they receive a disproportionately small share of the SDR allocation. So the very recent one that happened right after the COVID-19 happened basically of 650 billion dollars, about 62% of its allocations went to developing developed countries, and Sub-Saharan Africa received only 3.5%. And one knows which countries needed it more than ever. So we need a lot more sort of turning this board around actually on the international financial architecture as well. But I would never say that Africa doesn't have the money because it does actually, and there's a lot of literature that would tell you that Africa is a net creditor. Many years ago it seems like now, but I had also written a paper where Africa is a net creditor basically because a lot of money goes out of Africa through illegal channels, you know. And just to give you a sense, just through missing voicing, Africa loses about 83 billion dollars annually. And to put it in perspective, how big is this number actually? It's more than twice as much as the debt service that Africa paid in 2020. So Africa does have the money, but again, something that it loses like that. So given the slow progress on SDGs and huge financing needs, can we do better to mobilize long-term capital in Africa? That's the question. And I do think that the answer is yes with concerted efforts both domestically and internationally it can be done. So I'll actually give you just a little bit of a quick run because most of the stuff I'm going to say actually has been said by different papers around here. So undertake domestic reforms through somewhat I would call adopting a 5-P strategy. So what does it mean? It means from prudent regulation, of course enhancing regulatory frameworks for capital markets to ensure a stable and secure investment climate that actually helps build confidence and attracts capital. Then I've mentioned before, develop infrastructure bonds because that can actually give way for long-term growth. And this is almost like killing two birds with one stone. Basically it attracts long-term capital as well as actually closes the infrastructure gap that we have. And one of the ways of attracting capital in this infrastructure bonds is through tax incentives. That's something to think about. Something has already been talked about, what I call piggybacking on the future, strengthen regulatory frameworks for pension and insurance funds to ensure long-term growth and stability. Things that were mentioned actually in earlier papers. And then also something that was mentioned before, also facilitating private equity and venture capital to fuel innovation and entrepreneurship. Basically this is going to be private sector-driven growth which is going to lead to innovation and a lot more job creation, which we know the continent needs, given the number of youth that we are expecting actually by 2050. I think half of the world's youth is going to be in Africa, so we need and they need jobs. And last but not the least, here property potential actually encouraged the establishment of real estate investment trust to provide opportunities for smaller investors to participate in this market. So all that it can help is basically create wealth and help in long-term development. This is not enough but they can be complimented with what we call the fourth year approach, which means educating people in financial literacy basically. All stakeholders need to be taught a lot more about it so that they can make more informed financial decisions. Capital can move to the places where it needs to. So that's one way of doing it. Ending deepening regional integration to unlock new opportunities across borders. AFCFTA is one of those basically which can expand the market for African countries to have more capital and everything. And then engaging the diaspora. Issuing diaspora bonds where diaspora can actually have some skin in the game and they can actually feel that they're a part of the continent and they want to contribute to the future of Africa. And last but not the least, raising public-private partnership to finance long-term projects. Here everybody knows the benefits of actually having PPPs, basically pooling public resources and private sectors, innovation and expertise. And this can actually bridge a lot of the gaps that we have in long-term projects as well. On the international front, some of the things that can be done is reforming the SDR allocation formula and the channeling mechanism to consider liquidity and needs and promote greater utilization. So just to give you an example, developed countries utilization rate of SDRs is 43% and for developing countries it's only 6%. And I think this needs to change as well because we know who needs the capital more. It's the developing countries. And again, something that was recently set up was the RST, Resilience and Sustainability Trust which has about, I think, $5 billion in it, but only $5 billion had been lent because the conditions are so stringent in order to lend to these countries that nobody actually ends up actually getting the money. So those conditions need to be actually rethought. One of the other things that needs to be done, part of the reason why a lot of the developing countries are not able to access financing is because of the DSA, what is a very IMF-ish and World Bankish term, debt sustainability analysis. DSA is kind of, you know, works in such a way that if it shows that, you know, your debt is unsustainable, basically you're not able to actually access any financing. So there is a lot of push to actually refine the debt sustainability analysis, DSA, so that, you know, any of the borrowing that's done if it is actually leading to long-term growth and it's done for long-term investment reasons, that debt should actually be given a little bit lower weight than the other sort of debt so that it doesn't actually blow up your sustainability path. So that's another thing to be thinking about. And then some of the other things I think others have talked about, enhancing regulatory frameworks for credit rating agencies, ensuring adherence to established rules and accountability. Africa, ever since I've actually joined UNEK, I've only heard one thing basically, which is very true, that Africa has this negative risk sort of perception and it gets perpetuated through these credit rating agencies as well. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done here by enhancing regulatory frameworks so that credit rating agencies stick to that framework and not actually go off track. And then we can use de-risking instruments to enhance market access, such as credit guarantees, insurance, or currency hedging. We can also ensure debt clauses are more favorable for Africa. So in terms of debt restructuring, they can actually restructure on a better term so that they can get some kind of relief from debt service. And last but not the least, improving the dissemination and transparency of data, because that's very essential. If people do not have the data, they don't know the conditions in Africa. So dissemination of data can actually help better assessment of risk profile of these countries. Part of the reason is if you don't know what the risk profile is, you're not going to be able to actually attract capital as well. And UNECCA has been actually tackling some of these challenges head on. So we produce a biennial report which actually on these credit ratings, which assess long-term foreign currency sovereign credit ratings by these three credit rating agencies. It actually has policy recommendations for both the governments as well as the credit rating agencies in order to ensure that the ratings are fair. And we also hold webinars to discuss these reports so that we can highlight what are the challenges Africa faces and how they can be solved. And we also provide it from UNECCA actually, my colleagues, I don't do it, but my colleagues do it. We actually provide technical support to member states who are wishing to be rated. Because sovereign rating is a prerequisite to issue debt in international markets. So we try to actually hand hold and try to make sure that the entire process is fair so that they can actually get a better rating. Last but not the least, I think Africa should leverage on green growth. I think in the morning there was this question about the mineral thing actually that came up during Hanan's presentation. Now interestingly enough, it has actually had, in earlier presentations too, it has actually a lot of minerals and it's always been considered a resource curse but it can be turned around because with 30% of global mineral reserves crucial for green transition, what Africa needs is a very clear policy vision. And what it needs is a great, it needs to create an environment that's conducive for long-term projects so that it can attract long-term capital here. And last but not the least is advancing carbon markets from where we can leverage carbon markets to finance Africa climate needs, boost energy, access, job creation, biodiversity. And in this entire thing, at COP 27, the launching of this African carbon market initiative was just the start of the whole process. So there's a lot Africa can do and by leveraging both green growth and these advancing carbon markets, it can solve not only its own climate problems and put itself on its sustainability path but can also help the global community to solve its own climate change problem as well. So here we go. I hope it was within 15 minutes. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much for that very good presentation. Sweeter. And now we go to Q&A. I'm sure we have quite a couple of questions. Thank you. Dan Banek from the University of Oslo. I have a question for Amir and perhaps also to Tony and that relates to the sovereign wealth funds. As you know, you're in Norway. We have one of the biggest sovereign wealth funds and there is a particular governance mechanism where only a small portion of the fund is used by the government in the annual budget. Now, whenever I've had conversations on this with particularly colleagues in Nigeria, there's always this debate on whether we should be saving for the future, which is what is our cunning plan in Norway versus using money now. And in your presentation, of course, you made the argument that you have to use it now. The question is, will it work in the sense that how much of it should be used, and what extent should one be thinking about the future? Thank you. Thank you. Alan Rowe from the University of Warwick and UNWIDER. Thank you very much for those three, actually four very interesting presentations. I learned quite a lot about the up-to-date data on those various issues. But I think one topic was slightly written over, which is the point that majority of financialized savings in Africa goes through commercial banks. I think the last presenter did make that point. And that creates a problem because commercial banks from colonial times have tended to favor a limited set of loan types and, above all, very short-term loan types. So that 90% plus of financialized savings that is available to the system doesn't really figure at all in the discussion about long-term finance. And the problem I've also seen in some other countries is where they have been, come to you like Tanzania to some extent, Kenya, where there's been successful development of pension schemes, albeit at a relatively small level. Pension funds have also tended to be rather risk-averse, going into property and, to some extent, having large balances with commercial banks, therefore putting their money into the same problem that the commercial banks are creating in terms of long-term finance. The last point is that, unfortunately, there's the element in the room which is that fiscal deficits in Africa have been traditionally quite significant and are increasing, and governments are really good at pre-empting quite a large part of the bond funds, as several of the presenters made the point, in other words, crowding out a lot of the other things that the capital markets might otherwise be financing. Not least a large number of the private sector investments that the continent will certainly need in the next 20 or 30 years. So I think those two issues, the dominance of commercial banks in savings mobilization and the ongoing dependence of governments on pre-empting or needing to preempt a large part of those financialized savings, ought to be very much on the agenda of this type of topic. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Jeff Udundo. I'm the CEO of the Narrow Security Exchange. Nice to get direct reflections. It just hit me on the face. Right. My question is to do with the, just complimenting the question that has just been asked, about the dominance of banks. Now, what we've seen in sub-Saharan Africa, banks want to be everything to everybody. So they're involved in the insurance space, they're involved in the capital markets, and then they're doing their core business. But because of serious dislocation, because whereas banks are meant to serve short-term working capital needs, they are actually involved in capital markets. And what we're seeing now is that the capital markets are not developing, because all the opportunities that capital markets can fund, banks are coming in. We're talking about infrastructure. I think banks are now giving loans to government to do infrastructure. And these should be long-term funded opportunities. And they're then causing the crowding out effect, which now is causing a serious strain on private sector growth. So I just want to find out, is there, in your research, maybe another jurisdiction, how does that interplay happen between the banks and the capital markets? And secondly, those sovereign wealth funds then drive long-term domestic mobilization of resources, because in Africa it's not there. I think we have not seen it happen, and probably that could be one of the solutions we should explore. Thank you. Shall I answer the first one? Yeah, we're done. Thanks for your question. So does no way holds an experience with relevant policy lessons for African countries? I think the short answer from our point of view is no. And I think it's not just a matter of desirability, but also feasibility, because the Norwegian experience, which means basically living like a rentier or like a pensioner, you only actually invest the returns on those investments, it sounds all great, but you actually need to reach a threshold in terms of resource transfer capital, where the returns on those investments actually suffice for domestic investments. And the only other countries that have this kind of comparable level in terms of resource transfer capital are those in the Gulf, right? So Kuwait, Qatar, and in Africa it's only Equatorial Guinea, perhaps Gabon, but the rest, the size, actually in terms of resource transfer capital, Nigeria's resource wealth is 40 times lower that of Norway, which means that even if it's invested with the same fiscal resources in Norway, what the return would get would not suffice for as anything, right? Which is why, of course, investing domestically presents risks, but it's kind of like sometimes the Norwegian experience kind of delays these kind of difficult conversations that need to happen, right, in terms of breaking the mold that there is making those investments not possible. And actually in another paper for UNU Wider with Hadron Jank, we actually propose a dynamic model of resource rent investment whereby, of course, you need fiscal stabilization in the short term, but kind of not losing track of the long-term objective of structural transformation so that after a few years, usually typically five to seven years, you're already fiscally insured, you can kind of gradually shift investments from financial assets overseas towards increasing the allocations for domestic investments. It actually links to another paper published by UNU Wider by Solomano and someone else who actually looked at some countries overly insured already, right, with their fiscal stabilization fund. So they might as well start investing domestically. Okay, thank you. I'll respond on the issue of pension funds. The question is, in terms of the risk of vastness, I think one of the challenges pension funds are facing is because they don't have enough finances because the contributions are a bit low. So you find commercial banks have more liquidity compared to pension funds. So what they do is to avoid taking risk adventures so that they can be able to meet their pension drawlings. And one of the things we think can be able to support development pension funds is you can enhance pension savings because then they'll be able to accumulate enough finances to support long-term projects. But given the current status in Africa, since the contributions are very low, they tend to avoid more riskier projects. They go for government securities which are a bit risk-free so that they can be able to meet their affinances. But other than that, one of the things is, other than the contributions, I think there's also competition for the limited clients. Let me call them clients because if you contribute to a pension fund, you're basically a client. So how do you then make your fund attractive to the contributors to ensure that you have relatively a bit higher return compared to others and avoid risk? So this is where the challenge is. And that's basically what we picked up from the start that we're doing. Then another issue was related to pre-emptive savings by the government. Well, the challenging thing is that the commercial bank has taken over the financial sector generally given what they're all they're doing. So the government will come into need of... the government needs financing they borrow from the market and basically the commercial banks will lend to the government. Of course pension funds also have a play but the proportion of pension funds lend to the government is not very high compared to what commercial banks do. So at the end of the day, we cannot be able to address the issue of fiscal sustainability given this kind of framework because there's mismatch of financing coming from the pension funds because they should be long-term in nature but they go for short-term equities. I think that's where the issue is. Thank you. Thank you. I don't think there is any specific question for me but just to agree that the banking system dominates the financial system close to about 80%, 80%, 80%. But one of the reasons why some of our long-term funds like the pensions don't go for long-term investments is the restrictions. They are not supposed to invest more than... I can't really remember but they are restricted where they can invest. So that is also an issue but I think the government now, especially for Kenya is trying to reason out how best these funds can be put into long-term finance because most of them, as you correctly said, they're in short-term investments and they invest with the banks and even short-term investment and these cost us money. I mean opportunities in terms of having long-term investments. So that is an issue but I think currently the government is concerned about that. About that, yeah. Thank you. We have any more questions? Okay, just to add on a bit. Another thing which I think I didn't mention is the products which are there. In the developing world, do you have products where pension funds can invest in? Because that is also key. If the products are not there, then they just compete for the short-term investments where banks are. So that's also a challenge in these countries because the capital market is not well developed. As you've seen, only about 28 countries have stock exchanges and the bond market is now very small. With that then, there's no avenue for investment by pension funds. Okay, thank you. Any more questions? Yes, one question. Then we go to the online questions because we have only seven minutes. So please make it short. Yeah, sure. Thank you. You know, my question is that is there a scope for pension funds to invest in regional development banks, for example, the ADB, African Development Bank? Because these funds have been touted as a possible source of revenue for such institutions. In a space where the capital is constrained to the developing countries, I'll give you an example. In Zambia, for example, last year, the National Pension Fund agreed to invest in a road project as part of a consortium because they have this idle money which is sitting there which can otherwise not be deployed. So why don't we see more that why don't we see pension funds taking up stake in the African Development Bank? Thank you. Thank you. I think we'll have the online questions then we have those three taken together. Good, thank you. We have two online questions. The first one is, how does the performance of sovereign wealth funds compare with that of national investment banks globally? If this pattern is different from that that is seen in Africa, what do you estimate is the cause of the disparity? That's the first one. And the second one is, it is reported that Africa loses through capital flight, etc. It's about 100% more than the amount spent annually serving debt. How can this trend be rapidly reversed within five years to make funds available for investment infrastructure and other development assets? Thank you. So for the first question, I have no idea what the answer is. And I think that has to do with the porous definitions of what is a sovereign wealth fund, a development fund, a national development bank. And the short answer would be that basically it's difficult to compare because those have different roles across countries. But also ultimately, it doesn't matter what it's called as long as it has this kind of purpose. For example, in Brazil, this kind of mission of financing structural transformation has been taken on by the National Development Bank, BNDS. In Malaysia, it's the sovereign fund that is taking on this role, which actually is Kazana National, which used to be a sovereign wealth fund. Then it kind of shifted to being a sovereign development fund and now they call themselves a sovereign venture fund. So essentially, if you just look at what is a fund, what is the National Development Bank, you might lose a lot of this nuance of what is it that it actually does. So in that sense, I don't know what the answer is, but I'm not sure how helpful it will be in terms of making the decision on a case-by-case basis of which one is more useful. Okay. I'll respond to the question on pension funds investment in regional banks. I think one of the issues is the restrictive regulatory environment because that's what is affecting pension funds in Africa and limiting their developments because you'll find that there's a regulation in terms of what proportion of the assets they can invest in other areas. And even the management of the pension funds itself, the accountants where you don't have a specific regulatory agency, they are managed as departments under the National Treasury. So this limits the growth of these funds because now they are managed like any other government institutions within the ministry. So if the regulatory framework can be opened up, then I think this can open avenues for pension funds investment in regional banks. But then we need also to find a framework within which this can be enhanced because going to invest in a regional bank also means that first the regional banks must have assets that can attract the pension funds. So if the framework is there, then the specific countries need to revise the regulations because this is what then will enable the funds flow to those countries. I think that's the short answer I can give. But in terms of investment infrastructure, investment can be either directly through infrastructure projects or bonds or indirectly by taking equity up equity in infrastructure entity. So that can be done. Thank you. What was the last question actually? I think somebody was asking about how to get rid of the debt service something to really do. Yes, that how can this trend be rapidly reversed within five years to make funds available for investment in infrastructure and other development assets? So I mean like the only way I can think about it actually when I was making the presentation 40 billion dollars actually is spent in debt service alone. Think about if this was to be used for development purposes. Now how do we get rid of this thing unless there is another debt forgiveness somewhere because DSSI did not help much during COVID when we had the debt services in debt service suspension initiative. It didn't help much because most of the countries didn't even were eligible to get this DSSI. I mean like you know suspend their debt service. They didn't go because all that it would have done was to actually give a negative perception about their sustainability which would lead to basically downgrading of their ratings actually in the financial markets and making it even harder for them to actually access. So I think that's one of the ways and there's a lot of euphoria about you know this debt for sustainability swaps like you know debt for climate swap and all these kind of things. From the work I had done actually at ESCAP where we had analyzed some of these things. They don't do much because first of all it's not they don't create fiscal space for governments to do anything. So it's just you had to pay me 100 dollars it's not that you got another 100 dollars in your hand right basically. So it really doesn't do much. We started the case of Indonesia I mean like it doesn't create fiscal space for them to actually do and another thing is also it's basically even if you get this debt for development swap whatever you know it's actually tied. It's not that you want to spend your money whatever you would have paid in debt service you want to spend on education but if I have actually made a deal with you it's going to be on climate you can't do that. So there's a lot of euphoria about that but I don't actually am not too positive on that thing. I guess one of the ways of doing it I never thought I would actually repeat an IMF line to strengthen their macro fundamentals so that they can attract fresh capital so that they can invest in long term future of their own country. So that's it. Thank you. I think our time is over. Thank you very much. Could we clap for the presenters please?