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Africa-Europe Alliance: Four new financial guarantees worth €216 million

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The European Commission signed today four guarantee agreements worth €216 million that will help unlock €2 billion to invest in renewables, urban infrastructure and start-ups in Africa and the Neighbourhood. The guarantees were signed with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the European Investment Bank (EIB), the German KfW Group and the Spanish development cooperation agency, Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID), at the 4th Strategic Board meeting of the External Investment Plan (EIP).

Commenting on these financial guarantees, Jutta Urpilainen, Commissioner for International Cooperation and Development, said: “The agreements signed today, worth €216 million, will aim to unlock €2 billion in new investment in Africa and the EU Neighbourhood. These guarantees share in the risk and help mobilise and attract public and private investments. They will help boost the supply of renewable energy to communities and businesses in Africa and the EU Neighbourhood, help small businesses invest and create jobs, and make African cities more resilient to growing populations and the effects of climate change. They are an example of how the EU’s new Green Deal initiative benefits citizens of our partner countries outside the EU”.

Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Olivér Várhelyi added: “We want to ensure an investment boost that will drive forward growth and provide concrete benefits and opportunities to the people, for example when it comes to big infrastructure projects or the support to young entrepreneurs. The direct support to investment is a key element, but so are good governance and a conducive business environment that helps attracting investment, both domestic and foreign. This is why the External Investment Plan supports our partner countries also in developing more effective legal frameworks, policies and institutions that promote economic stability, sustainable investment and inclusive growth.”

Four guarantees, one goal: more investment where it’s needed the most

These guarantees will significantly boost investment in renewable energy and increase access to finance for small businesses (MSMEs), while also improving investment in urban infrastructure and services in Sub-Saharan Africa and in the EU Neighbourhood.

·     Resilient City Development (RECIDE)

This €100 million guarantee agreement is signed with AECID, the Spanish development cooperation agency. It targets Sub-Saharan Africa and the EU Neighbourhood. It will help cities develop public-private partnerships and lower the risks for private investors involved in financing urban infrastructure, focusing on: energy efficiency, flood protection, public transport, water sanitation and solid waste treatment. The guarantee reassures lenders that they will recover at least some of their investment in the event of losses and lowers borrowing costs.

·     Boosting Investment in Renewable Energy 

This €50 million guarantee agreement with EBRD will help to scale up investment in renewable energy in Ukraine and in the EU Southern Neighbourhood, in particular in Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia. It will substantially boost renewable energy potential. The guarantee will help to generate a total investment of up to €500 million and is expected to provide 340 MW of additional installed renewable energy capacity.

·     Supporting Investment in Sustainable Energy 

This €46 million guarantee agreement with the KfW Group will help to expand the generation of renewable energy in Sub-Saharan Africa and cut the region’s carbon emissions and increase energy efficiency. It will partially cover the offtake risks in renewable energy projects, such as windfarms and solar energy. This guarantee will give many more people access to energy and reduce power shortages. 

·     SME Access to Finance

This €20 million guarantee agreement with EIB is targeting Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the EU Neighbourhood, with a particular focus on young entrepreneurs, women entrepreneurs and start-ups. It will provide affordable funding to small businesses, with less access to finance because local financial institutions consider them as riskier clients. The guarantee is providing local banks and financial institutions a first loss credit protection. This guarantee will sustain around 18,000 jobs and support 1,000 small businesses. 

These guarantees are part of the External Investment Plan, which aims to mobilize more than €47 billion by 2020 in public and private investment for development in countries neighbouring the EU and in Africa using €4.6 billion in EU funds.

Background

The EU External Investment Plan has three pillars. The first is finance. Through financial guarantees, the EU mitigates the risk in countries with difficult environments so that private investors and development banks will lend to entrepreneurs or finance development projects. Three guarantee agreements had previously been signed so far: Nasira Risk-Sharing Facility and FMO Ventures, with the Dutch Development Bank and Archipelagos – One Platform for Africa, with Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP), the Italian Development Bank, and the African Development Bank (AfDB).

The plan’s second part is technical assistance. This funds experts who help authorities, investors and companies develop new projects. Technical assistance may include, for example, market intelligence and investment climate analysis, targeted legislative and regulatory advice, support to partner countries in implementing reforms, chains and identification, preparation, and help to carry out necessary investments.

The third pillar consists of investment climate support. The EU works closely with governments in partner countries to help them improve the conditions which investors need like a good business environment and political and economic stability. The EU also brings together governments and business to discuss investment challenges.

The External Investment Plan is a key part of the Africa-Europe Alliance for Sustainable Investment and Jobs, launched in September 2018 with the objective of creating 10 million jobs in five years, boosting investment and promote sustainable development. The von der Leyen Commission intends to use the full potential of the External Investment Plan to boost private capital and investment, including through further guarantee agreements.

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White House is following a narrow path of strict escalation toward superpower confrontation

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Current U.S. foreign policy toward Russia is following a narrow path of strict escalation toward superpower confrontation. Russia is not going to lead a peace effort, nor will Ukraine, writes Matthew G. Andersson, a law and policy author, he studied with White House National Security Advisor W.W. Rostow at the Johnson School of Public Affairs.

The Biden administration has through its own incompetence and incapacity, also left leadership open to other countries. It is a strategy that creates economic and industrial disruption, perhaps even deliberate destruction, including of American government itself.

Why would this be?

I suggest that there are six reasons that directly serve the “Biden” administration by this foreign policy of war escalation:

The current administration’s domestic social policies are so radical that they cannot be implemented (or disclosed) within a normal spectrum of law and government. Its plans require extra-constitutional authority. War provides that authority.

A formalized war footing with Russia is presumed an essential path to oil and gas supply disruption, both physical (exploration, production, and refinement, including Arctic claims) and price stability disruption, which presumably will accelerate green energy switching behavior (problem: there is nothing to switch to). In reality, war merely enriches oil and gas, and further consolidates its central energy role.

Financial flows, commercial/central banking, and U.S. dollar stability would all be subject to war-time emergency manipulation. The U.S. is not able to absorb over $30 Trillion in national debt obligations under normal economic arrangements and methods.

War is also an ideal platform to fully effect political persecution, and the marginalization or complete removal of competitive political parties. The U.S. is already well on its way to a single-party consolidation. A civil or world war “seals the deal” just as it did in wartime Germany, the Soviet Union, North Korea, and eventually in Cuba and China. The Biden administration has numerous “blueprints” it can follow from other countries, as the administration is saturated with inexperienced ideologues who both naively admire “revolutionaries” and at the same time are intellectually incapable of imagining and carrying out actual economic development policy.

A fifth reason involves traditional Pentagon motivations in defense spending. Most of the public (and even political class) doesn’t acknowledge that the GWOT (Global War on Terror) is still fully operational, but more, its legal infrastructure, formed after 2001 through the Patriot Act, among other legislation and executive orders (hundreds that remain undisclosed or unexamined) can be activated at-will under emergency pretext. Moreover, the GWOT has been turned inward toward America’s own citizens. All that was required was a structured program of terror accusations against a manufactured target: Trump provided that, and now Russia does in a war context.

Finally, war unleashes massive disruptions in population, demographics and health risk. The current administration and its supporters, above all else, are ideologues devoted to population control because it is the “root cause” of global warming. And global warming is the fundamental organizing policy of the Left, even though it has nothing to do with climate, but rather with absolute social control.

An unsettling aspect of the Biden administration’s foreign policy is that, while it seeks war, it isn’t prepared to fight one (especially with a putative civilian commander qualified for 25th Amendment removal): it invites a confrontation with Russia (and to some extent with China) not to win, but in an unprecedented perversion of U.S. national security interests, to lose: it has declared America, Americanism, and a majority of Americans, as its enemy.

It will use Russia as a tool for its own domestic “transformation” which means the attempted dismantling of U.S. constitutional law.

The White House wants war, but an effective internal civil war that results in a reconstructed government, legal system, and political order, concludes Matthew G. Andersson.

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Polish militants join armored assaults into Russian Territory

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Polish militants fighting in Ukraine have participated in recent assaults into Russia’s Belgorod Region, with the Polish Volunteer Corps releasing an announcement and video evidence of their roles in these operations. The militants were specifically involved in an assault of Belgorod’s Grayvoron District on May 22, which was one of the initial major incursions launched from Ukrainian territory, writes “Military Watch Magazine”.

Videos published by the Polish militants regarding their operations show them using Ukrainian T-72B tanks and Mi-8 helicopters as well as U.S.-supplied HMMWV armoured vehicles, which comes as part of a much wider trend towards Polish combatants in Ukraine being given extensive access to weapons supplies as they are often considered more reliable than many of the local conscript units.  

Poland has been outstanding even within the Western world for its hard line position against Russia, with senior politicians calling for Russia’s “balkanization” into separate states, while the country’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki stated shortly after the outbreak of fighting in Ukraine that the only way forward for the West was through “fighting” against Moscow…

The country has accordingly been a leading supplier of armaments to Ukraine. In contrast to political leaders, however, Polish military leaders have repeatedly expressed serious doubts regarding Ukraine and its allies’ ability to prevail in the ongoing war against Russia.

Although forces from multiple Western countries have been deployed very widely in Ukraine, forming what the ‘New York Times’ referred to as a ‘stealth network’ of assets directed by Western intelligence agencies to fight Russia within the country, Poland has been the leading contributor of manpower among foreign countries involved in the conflict.

Former senior advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Defence U.S. Army Colonel (ret.) Douglas McGregor accordingly reported the presence of an estimated 20,000 contractors from Poland alone who have played key roles in the war effort including in frontline positions such as Bakhmut, which was for months a key centre of hostilities until its capture by Russian forces in late May.

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Gen. Li Shangfu: “When jackals or wolves come, we will face them with shotguns”

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In his first international public address since becoming defense minister in March, General Li Shangfu told the Shangri-La Dialogue that China doesn’t have any problems with “innocent passage” but that “we must prevent attempts that try to use those freedom of navigation (patrols), that innocent passage, to exercise hegemony of navigation.”

A U.S. guided-missile destroyer and a Canadian frigate were intercepted by a Chinese warship as they transited the strait between the self-governed island of Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory, and mainland China. The Chinese vessel overtook the American ship and then veered across its bow at a distance of 150 yards in an “unsafe manner,” according to the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.

Additionally, the U.S. has said a Chinese J-16 fighter jet late last month “performed an unnecessarily aggressive maneuver” while intercepting a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance aircraft over the South China Sea, flying directly in front of the plane’s nose.

Those and previous incidents have raised concerns of a possible accident occurring that could lead to an escalation between the two nations at a time when tensions are already high.

Li suggested the U.S. and its allies had created the danger, and should instead should focus on taking “good care of your own territorial airspace and waters.”

“The best way is for the countries, especially the naval vessels and fighter jets of countries, not to do closing actions around other countries’ territories,” he said through an interpreter. “What’s the point of going there? In China we always say, ‘Mind your own business.’”

He accused the U.S. and others of “meddling in China’s internal affairs” by providing Taiwan with defense support and training, and conducting high-level diplomatic visits.

“China stays committed to the path of peaceful development, but we will never hesitate to defend our legitimate rights and interests, let alone sacrifice the nation’s core interests,” he said.

“As the lyrics of a well-known Chinese song go: ‘When friends visit us, we welcome them with fine wine. When jackals or wolves come, we will face them with shotguns.’”

In his speech U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin broadly outlined the U.S. vision for a “free, open, and secure Indo-Pacific within a world of rules and rights.”

Li scoffed at the notion, saying “some country takes a selective approach to rules and international laws.” “It likes forcing its own rules on others,” he said. “Its so-called ‘rules-based international order’ never tells you what the rules are and who made these rules.”

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