DENIS BARNETT, Durban | Monday 1.00pm
THE United States government’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation on Monday announced a $350-million fund for infrastructural development in sub-Saharan Africa.
“We hope this will launch in this part of the world a tremendous infrastructure-building that will further attract foreign direct investment,” OPIC chief executive George Munoz told a press conference at the World Economic Forum summit of southern African states being held in Durban.
“It is estimated that this $350-million fund will create more than 7000 jobs here in Africa,” Munoz added. The fund will be managed by a subsidiary of the Sloane Financial Group and will have offices in Johannesburg and east and west Africa.
“This will be OPIC’s largest fund of the 26 funds that we now have and will help leverage additional private capital that will be required to meet the critical infrastructure needs of this continent,” he said.
Leveraging and borrowing against the fund could realise one billion dollars, the US official said. The fund will go towards telecommunications, transportation, electric power, water and sanitation projects.
“These funds work because they are linked to fixed direct investment and the creation of jobs,” Munoz said.
OPIC is a self-sustaining US federal agency that sells investment services to small, medium and large American businesses expanding into some 140 developing nations and emerging markets around the world. “The fund is the largest fund that OPIC has ever done, it was done at the request of … President [Bill] Clinton when he was here last March, and also at the request of the US Congress which has expressed tremendous interest in this continent.”
In addition, OPIC announced job-creation investments in a further five projects across southern Africa — in Angola, Lesotho and Namibia — totalling $41-million. — AFP