The IMF has approved plans to ensure that the aim of ending poverty by 2030 becomes a reality. In view of this, the Managing Director of the IMF, Christine Lagarde laid out certain measures that would be taken by the fund to ensure that low income counttries were able to acess affordable loans.
The first of these measures include the approval of zero interest rates for low income countries on all the IMF’s concessional facilities until 2018. Lagarde said this on Thursday at the ongoing IMF/ World Bank 2016 General Meeting in Washington D.C. during a press conference.
Subsequent to this, Lagarde said that after 2018, IMF would maintain low interest rates around the world. Spaking on the importance of this development, Lagarde said “This is really important for low-income countries to be able to actually absorb the shocks without necessarily going to the international markets or relying on bilateral lending that can be far expensive,’’
Another provision that the IMF disclosed was that the IMF had agreed to also maintain the overall lending capacity of close to one trillion dollars by extending access to bilateral borrowing agreements with pledges of 344 billion dollars from 26 members already received.
Largarde said IMF was pushing for strong reforms in infrastructure and education in Africa. “With 1.6 per cent overall growth for sub-Saharan Africa, we really are going to develop our technical assistance, our training, our help in building capacity in addition to financing infrastructure, there is also the cap,’’ she said.
For Nigeria, this should be good news as Mrs Kemi Adeosn, the Minister of Finance has always stressed that Nigeria requires cheap sources of funds, especially from mutilateral lending bodies such as the IMF.
