Addis Ababa – The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says it will provide 500 million dollars to complement the Islamic Development Bank’s (IDB’s) loan portfolio for developing countries.
The foundation’s Director, African Team, Dr Ayo Ajayi, disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on the sideline of the just concluded third International Conference on Financing for Development organised by the United Nations.
Ajayi spoke of the need for developing countries to develop stronger domestic revenue generation strategies toward funding their development programmes rather than relying heavily on donor countries.
“It has to be much better revenue generation from domestic sources.
“Some countries are lucky to have news extractives, oil, gas, minerals coming up stream.
“But in others, they have to efficiently allocate the resources they already have, raise new ones, and draw in the private sector in much smarter ways to be able to make some of these commitments.
“In the international scene, as the OEDA is decreasing, you are finding much smarter partnerships being formed.
“For instance, at the conference, we are talking about collaboration that the Gates Foundation had with the Islamic Development Bank, where we are putting together a 500 million dollars fund that will complement the IDB’s two 2 billion dollars that they have in regular Sharia compliant loan letting.
“We think this is fantastic, because for very poor countries, they will be able to have their projects funded through this mechanism in which at least 35 per cent of the funding would be by grants. They will have to pay back the rest.“
Ajayi noted that the collaboration between the foundation and the IDB would make it possible for developing countries to engage in bigger and more developmental projects.
“That makes it possible for them to do bigger things, but also it makes it possible for them to afford the loans they are going to get because in essence, we are creating the mechanisms that buy back the cost of the loans to the country.
“How? Much smarter mechanisms are being generated for partnerships that will make it possible for the money to go farther than they’ve gone.
“But similar things have to happen at the country level, where there are public private partnerships together with much more transparent, much more accountable use of resources and together with much more efficient allocation of the resources that they have.“
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On the expectations of the foundation from the conference, Ajayi expressed the hope that development partners would collectively find way to finance the next stage of the world development, particularly the developing countries.
He expressed the hope that the foundation could alleviate the poverty level of the people within the next 15 years.
This, he said, could be done “if we are more purposeful, if we are much more collaborative and if we are smarter in the way we deploy resources.“
“Our hope is that we will come away from this conference with a renewed commitment to providing the financing that will be necessary for us to accomplish the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the global level, but specifically at the country level.
“Each country will need to harness its resources and the combination will be different from one country to country.
“In some countries, there will be a lot more local domestic resources that would be available in other poorer countries, which we will necessarily continue to provide more overseas assistance to.
“But all of these have to be directed towards measurable and accountable goals.“
The director said that with the use of reliable data, more dedication to transparency and accountability, “we can all come away in 15 years with a world in which a lot of people have been lifted out of poverty“.
He stated that more children would also survive while more women and girls would have the nutrition and resources they needed to live very healthy and productive lives.
“We are heavily investing in all of these areas, we are heavily continuing to dialogue that will lead to world commitments to make sure that these goals are realised,“ Ajayi said. (NAN)
