On 13 December 2023 in Abidjan, the Board of Directors of the African Development Fund, the African Development Bank Group’s (www.AfDB.org/en) concessional window, approved a €38.84 million loan to Benin to help implement the initial phase of the Economic Governance and Private Sector Development Support Programme.

This programme will increase the private sector's contribution to economic growth by enhancing the overall business climate, developing the agri-food sector and strengthening climate action.

“The aim of the Economic Governance and Private Sector Development Support Programme is to assist the Beninese government in its efforts to accelerate, develop and implement the structural reforms that are fundamental to boosting wealth creation,” said Robert Masumbuko, the Bank's Country Manager for Benin. “It will help to ease the bottlenecks to private sector development, particularly those relating to the business climate and support for the growth industries of the Beninese economy, especially the agricultural and agro-industrial sectors.”

The programme provides for the establishment of a technical committee to finalise the National E-commerce Strategy, which will define the regulatory framework for online commerce and facilitate financial transactions. It will also result in an update of the communication plan for the National Gender Strategy for the agricultural sector, drafted in July 2021, with an action plan for the period 2022-2026. The goal of the strategy is to reduce gender inequalities in the sector.

Finally, the initiative will support the Investment and Export Promotion Agency’s approval of a project to set up an electronic window to facilitate investment and exports in Benin. This is a paperless platform designed to remove obstacles to trade and reduce the time required to obtain the necessary investment licences and authorisations.

Once it has been fully implemented in 2024, the Economic Governance and Private Sector Development Support Programme will play its part in achieving noteworthy results. These include increasing private investment to 30.2 % of GDP in 2024, versus 29.9 % in 2022, and reducing the time taken to pay government debts to micro, small and medium-sized enterprises from 200 days in 2021 to 60 days from 2024 onwards. The programme will also make it possible to increase the added value of the agri-food industries, the contribution of which to GDP will rise from 6.1 % in 2022 to 6.4 % in 2024. In the farming sector, the programme will increase the level of gender mainstreaming from 10 % in 2022 to 15 % in 2024.

On 18 October 2023, the African Development Bank Group's active portfolio comprised 18 operations, equating to a total amount of $997.08 million.