The African Export and Import Bank, together with the Secretariat of the Africa Continental Trade Area is making progress with moves to reduce the cost of transacting business among African Countries under the agreement.

Cost of doing business has been identified as a key challenge in promoting intra-African trade to unavailable common payment system for all the 54 countries.

However, speaking with Journalists in Accra, Secretary General at the African Continental Free Trade Agreement, Wamkele Mene hinted that the African Export and Import bank is helping to develop a common payment system which will lead to a reduction in transacting business among member nations.

“We are working as hard as we can to make sure that the pan African payments and settlements platform is rolled out and is up and running as early as possible next year. I’m not able to give time lines now because we are working with African Export and Import Bank.”

“However, we are fully conscious of the fact that it has to be up and running if we want to reduce the cost of transactions and the cost of trade in Africa. So, we are trying to make sure that if we roll out the trading date on 1st January 2021, the platform is rolled out at the same time. But it’s difficult to give a deadline but we are working as hard as we can to make sure we achieve that objective”, he emphasized.

African Export-Import Bank

African Export-Import Bank, also referred to as Afreximbank, is a pan-African multilateral trade finance institution created in 1993 under the auspices of the African Development Bank.

It is headquartered in Cairo, Egypt and its vision is to be the trade finance bank for Africa.

Its mandate is to finance and promote intra- and extra-African trade using three broad services.

These are Credit (Trade finance and Project finance), Risk Bearing (Guarantees and Credit Insurance) and Trade Information and Advisory Services.