The United Nations Development Programme claims that in order to reduce borrowing costs in Africa, it will concentrate on increasing the openness of the credit rating systems.
According to The News Agency of Nigeria, this was said in a webinar by Chief Economist, UNDP, Africa Bureau, Dr. Raymond Gilpin, in his remarks made on Friday at the United Nations University.
“Lowering the Cost of Borrowing in Africa” was the webinar’s designated UNDP Policy Recommendation.
In order to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa estimates that the continent will require annual investments of $1.3 trillion.
However, the continent is predicted to need an additional $200 billion per year to accomplish the SDGs because African governments are unable to finance these expenditures with income from trade and grant aid.
A country’s creditworthiness is also determined by the major credit rating agencies, each of which impacts how much interest a country pays on its loan and how much money flows into the borrowing country.
FitchRatings, Moody’s, and Standard & Poor’s are the three main credit rating companies.
According to Gilpin, the organizations were rating African nations using insufficient information.
The economist added that the UNDP and its partners will prioritize increasing the credit ratings methodology’ transparency so that the African countries and other nations could understand them and so it would be clearer to investors.
Additionally, he declared that they will use standardized alternative ratings. Because doing so would not be prudent, “this is not intended to replace the main three credit ratings.
“Several European nations received negative ratings as a result of what they did in the wake of the global financial crisis, which was comparable to what other European nations did.
“The European Commission thought that was due to insufficient data and some opacity, so there were procedures that were put in place to address that to ensure that the ratings represented true concerns and not just a panic after the financial institutions.”
Gilpin claimed that while the majority of African nations knew how to interact with multilateral organizations like the International Monetary Fund, they were unaware of how to do so with credit rating agencies.
He claimed that the majority of them lacked technical knowledge and a thorough understanding of the procedure.
“We want to help them so that they can participate in this process better, and in this context, we believe that much more assistance for African countries should be provided before, during, and after the rating agencies.”
The UNDP spokesman added that the agency would provide a data platform using conventional and unconventional data sources, similar to the one used in trade economics, to help African nations.
Additionally, he stated that the UNDP would create a team of experts to make themselves available to African nations while the credit rating process is ongoing.
“In our discussions with some of the credit rating agencies, they made it clear to us that there is not as much constructive feedback to the initial assessments in African countries due to a lack of capacity in African countries.”
“If we can help the African countries, they will be able to conduct the analysis and, perhaps, fill in some of the data gaps from internal and external sources.”
The economist claimed that the UNDP’s immediate actions for the time being were to provide data assistance to African governments and to form a team of consultants.
In light of this, he declared that cutting borrowing costs was crucial for African growth.
