COMMENT: Big bond for Africa

Specifically, donors would borrow against future aid flows in capital markets. That way, they could exploit current low interest rates at home, as they generate new resources. With 30-year US Treasury rates of about 3%, donors would have to securitise only about $5 billion to raise $100 billion. That money could come from the $35 billion in annual official development assistance (ODA) to Africa (which totals about $50 billion) that takes the form of pure grants.

Donors would pass on the interest cost to African countries, reducing their own fiscal costs. For African countries, the terms would be better than those provided by Eurobonds. In fact, as audacious as it may sound, passing on the interest costs to recipient countries could actually bolster their debt sustainability.

According to a study of eight countries by the African Development Bank’s Policy Innovation Lab, a 3% interest rate in US dollar terms would be lower than the marginal cost of commercial borrowings undertaken by several African countries over the last five years. Moreover, far longer maturities and grace periods, compared to market finance, would ease growing pressure on foreign-exchange reserves.

Frontloading aid in this way is not new. Doing so in the early 2000s to finance vaccines saved millions of lives in the developing world. Big Bond resources, managed by the African Development Bank, could be used to help guarantee financing for major regional infrastructure projects that have long been stuck on the back burner, such as the East Africa Railway connecting Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi, and a highway stretching from Nigeria to Côte d’Ivoire. Such projects could also be co-financed by private investors.

Moreover, the Big Bond could help to reinvigorate the relationship between donors and African countries. And, as it supports investments with important country-level benefits, it could serve as an incentive for African countries to pursue reforms that increase their absorptive capacity, in terms of choosing and executing public infrastructure investments.

The Big Bond approach represents a much-needed update to the ODA framework – one that supports higher and more sustainable growth in recipient countries, while lowering the burden on donor countries. At a time when aid is under political pressure, perhaps such a bold approach to maximizing the efficiency of donor resources is exactly what the world needs.

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Nancy Birdsall is President Emeritus and a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former finance minister of Nigeria and managing director of the World Bank, is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Center for Global Development.

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Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2017.
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