Transcript

Transcript of the African Finance Ministers Press Briefing

April 18, 2015

PARTICIPANTS:

AISSATA SIDIBE, Moderator

AMARA KONNEH
Minister of Finance of the Republic of Liberia

ABDALLA KADRE ASSANE
Minister of Finance and Budget of the Central African Republic

GERVAIS RAKOTOARIMANANA
Minister of Finance and Budget of Madagascar

Webcast of the press briefing

MS. SIDIBE: Good morning. Welcome to the African Finance Minister’s Press Briefing. My name is Aissate Sidibe and I will be moderating the session this morning. I’d like to introduce you to the panel this morning. To my extreme left is Minister Abdalla Kadre Assane, Minister of Finance and Budget of the Central African Republic. And then after him is Minister Gervais Rakotoarimanana, Minister of Finance and Budge Madagascar. We’re expecting Minister of Malawe Goodall Gundwe, hopefully he can make it and then finally Minister Amara Konneh, Minister of Finance of Liberia. This press conference will be one hour on the dot. The ministers will each speak briefly for about 25 minutes and then we will open it up for questions. We will first start with Minister Assane. We’ll do it by alphabetical order so it will first be Minister Assane, then Minister Konneh, and then we’ll do Goodall Gondwe, and Minister Rakotoarimanana. Minister Assane?

MR. ASSANE: Thank you very much, Ms. Sidibe, ladies and gentleman, journalists, it is an honor for me the Minister of Finance and Budget of the Central African Republic to be able to participate at this meeting and in particular to be able to address you at this press conference. As you know our region in Africa confronts a number of issues and with regards to the Central African Republic in particular. ours is a country that has been in the press recently because ours is a very fragile country and with the disturbances in particular in 2013, there have been large scale rioting and looting and this has impacted growth which has actually been in negative terms. Two thousand fourteen was a year in which we saw a lot of mobilization especially in the international realm in support of Africa. We have seen international forces deployed in MISCA in order to help the Central African people who were facing issues. In addition, there were friendly countries that have strongly supported with aid which has allowed us to increase growth rate to 1.6 percent, but inflation rate with all the supply difficulties has still been very high, close to 11 percent at least as estimated by the IMF.

So we are indeed confronting security issues. There was an IMF program –- a rapid program that was put in place to support the Central African Republic in 2014. We saw that all the social contributions were paid out in order to support the people. This is a country that is at the heart of the African continent, but it’s also the soft underbelly of the region whether it be Central Africa, the CEMAC and also other organizations and regional entities.

When the heart is impacted you know that it’s very difficult for the rest of the region to pull through. The prospect that we see right now focuses on security and this is something that we have seen has had an impact in the first quarter and we think it will be close to 5.7 percent growth. This is based on the most recent estimates by the IMF. And also the deployment of the United Nations Peacekeeping Missions, we are going to see a lot of activity in 2015. Politically, progress has been made especially with regards to reconciliation. The current government is focused on national reconciliation and dialogue. Those are the priorities of the current government in order to address many of the issues of the recent past.

Agreements have been signed in Brazzaville first of all. These are called the peacekeeping agreements and in January, February we held grassroots consultations and the ministers went to the most remote areas in the country to meet with citizens to listen to them and to convey and gather all of their wishes which are now reflected in a report that will be used as basis for the Bangui forum that will take place in late April to early May. So this is all focusing on reconciliation in the Central African Republic.

At the same time we will be holding elections. These need to be organized as soon as possible in order to pull out of the situation. The elections are expected to be held in August and today we are working unstintingly with the help of development partners in order for these elections to take place in a peaceful environment. And we want to see demobilization, reinsertion and repatriation of ex-combatants. At the same time, a major reform is being considered and this is the security sector reform.

All of these activities will make it possible to face this transition and to be able to have legitimate authorities take office and allow the development partners to provide massive aid to the country not only to fully stabilize the situation, but also to implement plans that aim at the country’s recovery because from stabilization we need to move towards recovery to enable Central Africa to once again join the international nations.

Our challenges are to mobilize financial resources first of all in order to be able to bridge the budget gap that is about $22 million dollars. We have the electoral bridge that is about $17 million dollars in order to be able to move forward and hold peaceful elections. And at the same time, we have the program for the demobilization, the DDR program that also requires a massive input approximately $10 million dollars. Success in the Central African Republic will allow the sub-region which is the soft underbelly in Africa because we have Darfur and Southern Sudan and also Boko Haram. And we have to make sure that we do not allow them to move through our country because there is no army in place right now.

With the help of the international community efforts must be carried out to prevent all of these harmful effects. The success for our country will be success for the different regional unions as well as the international community as a whole. So today I call upon the international community to enable the Central African Republic to recover. Madame moderator that is what I wanted to say with regards to the intervention and focusing on the Central African Republic which is a concern for the international community and in particular for Africa.

MS. SIDIBE: We’ll now move to Minister Amara Konneh from Liberia.

MR. KONNEH: Thank you very much, Aissata. Good morning everyone. You all know that Liberia has been in the news in the past year with regards to the Ebola virus disease epidemic together with Sierra Leone and Guinea. About a year ago we were confronted by this disease that changed everything for our three countries. I am from Liberia but I will be speaking in sub-regional terms because of the impact of Ebola on our sub-region.

The disease ravished our economy beyond imagination. As you know some of the fastest growing economies in Africa that contributed to Africa’s robust growth were Liberia and Sierra Leone, particularly Sierra Leone. But today that picture has changed in that with the declining commodity prices driven by slow, global growth our major commodities, iron ore and rubber have suffered a lot. So this has caused economic problems back home, but these are exogenous factors beyond our control. We are hoping that the IMF, the World Bank can all work with countries to put in place policies that will help them to deal with this issue because this issue depends on how fast China economy can rebound.

With regards to the Ebola virus disease the Sierra Leone economy was projected to grow by 11 percent. It’s now revised downward to six percent and then with the declining iron ore prices they expect for the contraction. For Liberia, we were projected to grow at six percent, but with the decline in commodity prices and the Ebola disease our economy sort of got into a freefall to around one percent in 2014.

Guinea was projected at 5.4 percent, now they are down at another one percent. So you can imagine all three countries have been through periods of conflict, civil conflict, political instability so we are just beginning to rebuild to put our economies on a trajectory that was positive, but we have to recalibrate now to recover faster. This week in Washington we presented out sub-regional recovery plan yesterday.

Our leaders are calling for a Marshall Plan type of intervention that will help the three countries recover faster so that they can continue to contribute to Africa’s growth, to contribute to the West African growth that is lead by Nigeria. During the crisis we experienced a lot of difficulties. Liberia in particular is an import intensive country. We import a lot of commodities so with the isolation by the international community this would have been disastrous so the international flights left, some ships were hesitant to come to Liberia so it put the country at risk, we were expecting inflation to be out of control, the WHO was projecting 10,000 people to die every month from this Ebola which was very scary and they scared everybody away from us.

We had to take some fiscal and monetary measures to maintain macroeconomic stability, so that the country did not collapse and that requires some very tough policy decisions that were put in place to contain sort of government spending, but to strategically focus on you know fighting Ebola when international response was slow early on. We had to do this on our own. It was the leadership that the president and other political leaders provided going beyond the boundaries of the separation of powers. Our governing system to come together as one country to deal with this disease bringing people outside of the government around the table because we were talking about changing norms.

We are used to washing our bodies and burying them in a dignified way. They were telling us don’t touch them. We had to burn the bodies so there was resistance in the beginning to that, but in the end the people understood that it was their lives that were at risk and once they accepted and trusted the government that’s why you see the story today. Hopefully by May 15 Liberia will issue if there are no new cases we should be declared Ebola free. But the economy took a hit, we had to put inflation under control, to do some subsidizing major commodities like rice and other staples. We ended the year in spite of the threat around inflation of nine percent. This was single digit. We also increased spending in the health sector. We increased spending in government goods and services that stimulated the economy while we were isolated from the rest of the world.

But the key now is going to be recovering faster by rebuilding the health sector for resilience by focusing on education, increasing in agriculture spending, providing support to the private sector and of course the fourth area would be to invest in water, sanitation and hygiene services, and providing unconditional cash transfers to communities that were the hardest hit by the Ebola virus disease.

This is where we are going. We’ve managed to contain the disease. We’ve managed to maintain macroeconomic stability. We believe that we have turned the corner, but we are not yet out of the woods. At this spring meeting we are appealing to -– we are first thanking the IMF the World Bank for stepping up when we needed them the most.

The IMF unprecedently encouraged us to increase our deficit spending, but not only that they provided the relief through the catastrophic trust that is new to provide support to countries that were going through disasters. I think the rich countries should continue to contribute to that trust fund, because it could be other countries tomorrow not only in Africa but somewhere in the world that might go through an epidemic such as ours.

We extend greeting to our African neighbors, brothers and sisters, for their solidarity. The African Union dispatched doctors to Liberia that are still there and helping to build our capacity. At the end of all of this I think it is the governments that must take ownership of their own recovery. I think we’ve done it before after our civil war. We were just in a tenth year where we were registering on average eight percentage growth on the economy and helping to rebuild our lives. And I think we can do that again but we need additional support from our partners. Thank you.

MS. SIDIBE: Thank you, Minister Konneh, Minister Rakotoarimanana?

MR. RAKOTOARIMANANA: Thank you very much. Dear friends of the press I will rapidly tell you about the situation in Madagascar and the socioeconomic situation. As you know Madagascar has just come out of a social and political crisis that lasted about five years. It’s affected significantly the economic and social life of the country. Since January of this year with the implementation and the taking office of new officials, we’ve had democratic elections that have been recognized and now we are taking on the stabilization of our institutions in order to establish foundations for further inclusive and sustainable economic development. And that is the context within which the government has implemented the national development program. A program that was developed as a result of participatory assemblies.

And it stresses three elements governance, macroeconomic stability, inclusive growth as I’ve said before, so it covers social and financial issues. Right now that program is being implemented and in a few more weeks we will be producing a list of high priority programs that will be presented to the financial organizations for financing. We are now talking with the IMF in order to obtain the – enhanced credit facility. Now conversations are going on very well and I trust that we will be able to reach an agreement. And it’s as a result of these discussions that are going so well that we haven’t had too many problems in quantifying and adopting measures to get Madagascar back on track. Among the reforms that have been identified and proposed we have the strengthening of governance and increase in fiscal revenues which is important. A reform of public finance to improve the composition and the efficiency of public spending. There is also the promotion of the private sector which should lead to an improved business climate. Naturally, after identifying these high priority programs by October we will go to a conference with the donor organizations. We will invite all of the friends of Madagascar to come to that meeting, make their contributions for the sake of the country’s economic development and to get out country of the poverty which we have been now have been fighting for the last few years.

I solemnly invite everybody here who are money donors, foreign investors to come to Madagascar in this development effort. We are determined to move ahead to get out of our poverty given the tremendous economic potential which our country has, potential in the mining sector, potential in the field of agriculture, in the field of fisheries, tourism, et cetera. I thank you.

MS. SIDIBE: Thank you, Minister Rakotoarimanana. We will now open up for questions. Before we do that a few things. Please keep your questions short and concise so that we can allow for more questions. Identify yourself and identify your media outlet. Thank you.

SPEAKER: Peter Sunlar, Capital Intelligence Africa. My question is regarding the importance of private sector investment in Ebola to get past the Ebola emergency to the point where you are saying you are Ebola free in mid-May to security issues. We have the World Bank, we have IMF, we have all these Europeans. The biggest problem facing old Europe is lack of growth. Africa has always been an egine for growth. It’s the only place with long term growth prospects for the next 10 years for Europe. The Minister from Liberia, Minister Konneh, how effective was the private sector in overcoming the Ebola crisis and how much can you get the private sector to continue investing and continue moving after this emergency seems to be gone? And for the Central African Republic I always say nobody ever guards an empty bank how can you get investors and private sectors into your country where it makes protecting your country in stability and economic interest for everyone? Thank you.

MS. SIDIBE: Yeah, we’ll take another question. Do you have a question? Can you turn on your microphone please?

SPEAKER: That’s fine? Well I’m HINDUJA group of companies. We have been very well placed in many African countries. Now I had a president I met from Liberia and we had discussed about the issues of World Bank success stories which they should replicate where in many countries they have gone they should follow in other African countries. We are the biggest in transportation companies where we give a lot of knowledge, advice and how to improve the transportation systems like in Madagascar also we are now focusing on them to see how we could improve the transportation for the public because this helps to create jobs. It helps to improve the system for the public convenience.

It helps the administration for minings, for tourism, for other things so transportation is the key point where World Bank should create a PPP: private, public, partnership which we have done in Lagos, Nigeria. It is a success story. They should follow the success story into the countries where they need transportation very badly and our group would be happy to join hands with all these African countries which they need very badly. Thank you.

MS. SIDIBE: Thank you. Okay we’ll take the first question and then we’ll come back, Minister Konneh?

MR. KONNEH: Thank you very much. You asked an excellent question. I think one of the reasons why Liberia that was badly hit at the height of the epidemic turned the corner quickly was the inclusion of people outside of the government. And the private sector certainly was a part of that.

Because at the time of this crisis government revenue had declined by 25 percent because of the contraction in the economy. And so we did not have all of the resources to respond in a timely manner. It was the domestic private sector that did not leave, that rallied around its government to carry out the response faster. The private sector was certainly instrumental and played a key role because we invited the Chamber of Commerce and the Liberia Business Association to the table in the task force that the President set up to manage the epidemic. The other issue you raised perhaps I want to talk to quickly is the issue of security. As you know security is a key enabler for growth. And in the case of Liberia we are going through a transition where we have a huge contingent of the United Nation forces there but they are scheduled to leave the country by 2016. We are also investing in ramping up our own ability to provide our own security which we are doing by 80 percent now. This is a key part of our recovery. But at the end of the day for the private sector to continue to be viable in our post Ebola economic recovery program, not just Liberia but in Sierra Leone and New Guinea we are going to have to work on reducing the cost of doing business. And that’s what we are doing now so that we can make our sub-region more attractive for private sector. Thank you.

MS. SIDIBE: Questions? I’m sorry, Mr. Assane.

MR. ASSANE: Thank you very much Ms. Sidibe. The question as to the private sector is a very important question for the Central African Republic, especially because the CAR produces significant primary commodities. We produce diamonds, wood, timber, uranium, so how can we take advantage of the value of these commodities? So we need a private sector that’s well developed that can be the driver of growth. A private sector that can attract capital once we have a secure environment.

Because we have had the problem with security both safety but also legal security. As my colleague from Liberia has just said we have the UN troops that are in our country but next to the UN troops that are operating on the ground we are also forced to reform the security sector and establish a sound security system that will lead economic actors and investors to feel secure and that will give value to the commodities that we produce and we are currently working on this, we’re aware of it and we cannot get away and turn our back to it.

The problems we’ve had include massive unemployment and people have no other opportunities except to grab weapons to join rebellion. Once we have security and once we develop the private sector, then we can stabilize the situation and that’s a very important response to face the situation. This is my contribution in answering the question you’ve asked that’s a very, very important question for us.

MS. SIDIBE: We will take questions now. Please

SPEAKER: Good morning, my name is Kamal Taya Oropo from the Guardian newspaper in Lagos, Nigeria. My question is directed to Minister Konneh. The IMF intervention is a good thing and everything but would you say the intervention is sufficient? Are there any other area you expect the Fund to intervene on more than what we’ve seen on paper and I wanted to answer that in the context of the perception of the Fund in the sub-region. When you said intervention would be sufficient enough on the long run to improve on that perception in this sub-region, thank you.

MS. SIDIBE: We’ll take another question.

SPEAKER: Yes, my name is (inaudible) I work for the Sun Newspaper Nigeria. I remember that during the Ebola crisis Nigeria extended some support to Liberia and in your speech you didn’t acknowledge that. You said it was like solely IMF had been acknowledged. Besides that truth, apart from what the IMF is giving you at this moment are there other development partners that have keyed into your post-recovery Plan.

Can we know if there are other partners beside the World Bank Group that have supported you and we want to know by how much. Thank you.

MS. SIDIBE: Thank you. Minister Konneh will take those two questions and then we’ll move on a little bit from Liberia.

MR. KONNEH: Okay, the first question has to do with whether the IMF support is sufficient. We appreciate the support that they have given us so far, the flexibility there. We know how strong the conditionalities of the IMF in terms of supporting countries like ours can be. But in the midst of this crisis they took an extraordinary step to relax some of the stringent rules for those of us who are participating in their programs. I’m sure my two colleagues can tell you we have the ECF program with the IMF. This is the extended credit facility program for the IMF where you agree on a list of benchmarks for reforms, et cetera that becomes the trigger for their support to your balance of payment issues, to your reserve issues and to other policy reforms that you are pushing. Sometimes they can be stringent, but also they can be helpful in terms of focus in the government on the right set of issues that will help to maintain macroeconomic stability. It’s just that when it becomes unnecessarily stringent that would inhibit growth, that would inhibit development and the cost of unforeseen circumstances then those benchmarks become constraint on the country’s ability to grow. But our ability to navigate this here through our executive director’s office can be helpful as well so the IMF can play more role. In terms of additional support from them I just left a meeting with our country team so that we can look at our recovery programs that focuses on three key areas.

We want to go back from one percent to six percent in the shortest period of time so we need to continue to invest. We also need to invest in activities that will diversify the economy because the two primary areas of support to our economy are currently going through difficulties vis-a-vis the decline in prices of commodities which is a global issue. With regards to the second question perhaps there was an oversight maybe because of the timing issue. I was not able to mention Nigeria and the many other countries that support us during our crisis and the list is long. But this is why I said in my statement that we thank all those who came to our aid particularly our African brothers and sisters that were there with us in solidarity particularly in Nigeria when the first case -- the only case of Ebola that went to Nigeria came from Liberia from somebody who was going to a conference there. Nigeria was very effective in containing the virus and it was the lesson from there that also helped us to do that so perhaps Patrick Sawyer’s going to Nigeria must have been a bad thing, but we’ll also learn some useful lesson from there that helped the rest of us who were struggling to contain this disease to contain it. With regards to who is supporting our recovery program and how much has been pledged. Yesterday and the trip here this spring meeting was intended to put a plan, a strong plan on the table which we have done.

The next step now is first of all to look inward at governments, at our own budgets, at our own resources to see how we can align the resources to start some immediate interventions while we wait for our partners to watch our backs. We are redirecting spending so that we can focus on this recover program. Our healthcare system collapsed. We need to rebuild it for resilience. We need to get the kids back in school. We have more widows, more orphans, more widowers today than we ever had. We need to take care of those people because they too are out citizens. We need to increase investment in social programs like water, access to water, improving hygiene and sanitation facilities, et cetera. We cannot depend on internationals to start that before we can start – to give us money before we can start.

We are making some hard decisions to demonstrate to the international community, to all of your friends, that we will put our money where our mouth is. It’s just that the demand is too high and our resources are too little. We just need the extra push with the funding gap so to date we have not received any real commitment yet even though President Jim Kim announced a facility yesterday which we are trying to understand. The U.N. Secretary General says that he will convene and do the meeting and pledging session for a recovery plan in July. But between now and July what do we do? We have to provide for our people. And that’s what we are trying to do.

MS. SIDIBE: Thank you. Yes, Eleni.

SPEAKER: A very good morning ministers this is to the minister from Madagascar could you tell us a little bit about the blue economy and I know that there is going to be a big focus on that. And over and above the fact that you are seeing growth. The economy is expected to grow by about three percent this year. But you know prior to the crisis you saw growth of 5.8 percent what is it going to take to get you back to that level? What are you budgetary requirements? Thank you so much.

MS. SIDIBE: We’ll take another question.

SPEAKER: My name is Phillip Zappa for Business Day Nigeria. I heard the talk about Marshall Plan for Africa and I was wondering what the character of a particular Marshall Plan for Africa will be. The demand from the international community to respond to crisis, especially social economic crisis, can we get a sense of what Africa is really demanding in terms of this Marshall Plan?

Secondly, China is slowing in terms of growth and there are responses from different parts of the world with regards to that especially because in Africa there is an exposure to China in a lot of ways. I was wondering how is Africa responding to this slow growth? Because we know that in terms of commodity, in terms of demand for the commodities that Africa produces to China they are really exposed to China. Thank you.

MS. SIDIBE: Minister Rakotoarimanana you’ll take the Madagascar question and you can also perhaps answer the China question.

MR. RAKOTOARIMANANA: Thank you very much. Yes indeed. Before we did have that three percent growth and would like it to increase to five percent. Now obviously when talking about growth we cannot disregard the private sector which is very important in Madagascar and in particular for our economic development. They’ve actually played an extremely important role in past years when we had reached a 10 percent growth rate and this was pre-crisis.

If you now ask me how we can get back to such rates. Well it is by promoting the private sector because the problem in Madagascar that afflicted this sector was because of the crisis. There is a lack of infrastructure which is extremely severe right now in Madagascar, then we have the power issues, we haven’t yet found a solution to that. There is a deterioration of the business climate because of the crisis. These are the challenges that we must confront if we want to regain and achieve a five percent growth rate. The citizens expect of us right now in this post crisis area what they want to see are tangible and speedy results, but one of the challenges obviously is availability of financing.

Without funds it is very difficult to be able to increase growth rate. Let me now move to cooperation with China. Presently it’s somewhat stagnant. There was Chinese intervention earlier for instance in the building of infrastructure such as hospitals. Then we have cultural infrastructure and road infrastructure, but right now in Madagascar we are still in discussions with China about the possible intervention from that country to helping us in rebuilding the road infrastructure, but we are still at the negotiation stage and the same applies to other donors. So with regards to China’s participation and intervention let me just say there are no visible activities that would allow us to once again be able to start up the economy in Madagascar.

MS. SIDIBE: Minister Assane, would you like to answer the China question as well?

MR. ASSANE: Yes China today does play a very important role in particular when talking about support to African countries. At the same time China is present in particular for the construction of some economic infrastructure in our country as well as social infrastructure such as health structure, et cetera. Even in the exploitation of our natural resources, we are seeing more Chinese contribution and the slowdown of the Chinese economy is a matter of concern for us because we fear it may also limit the Chinese assistance that is so important in our continent.

We do hope that the growth will return to China in the very near future because demand for the raw materials of Central African Republic. In the case for instance of timber we have a lot of trade with China so the slowdown in China could result in problems for us also. We hope that the slowdown will be short in duration and that growth may come back because China has been recognized as a country with high growth compared to others. We truly do believe that China is important and we are closely monitoring the indicators for this friendly country that is of such importance to us.

With regards to the requirements under the Marshall Plan for Africa I do believe Africa requires infrastructure and I repeat: infrastructure. And if we want the private sector to flourish then we need the appropriate kind of infrastructure. We have roads, we have railroads and electricity that need to be developed. Without power we cannot develop. And we will not reach the desired growth rate.

Somebody pointed this out a little bit earlier that economic growth in Africa needs to be sustained. In order to achieve growth rates in all of our countries, countries that would like to be emerging markets, infrastructure is required. In particular the roads for better circulation of people and goods and we also have a river system that allows us to move goods and merchandise. But electricity needs to be developed in our countries. More recently we have noted that our problems in electrical power plays an enormously important role for Africa’s growth rate, so we do believe that the Marshall Plan could focus far more on developing infrastructure not only that but in our sub-region we do have economic programs that will make it possible to implement some activities so these economic programs need to be supported whether it be in Central Africa or Western Africa and also focus strongly on developing the private sector. These are some conclusions that I wanted to share with you, thank you.

MS. SIDIBE: Minister Rakatoarimanana you wanted to add something and then Minister Konneh you can finish on the Marshall question.

MR. RAKOTOARIMANANA: I just wanted to add to the answer that I gave before. I spoke about the private sector but since Madagascar is an agricultural country then there is a lot of room to develop agriculture. There is infrastructure needed for this sector also such as irrigation, but in addition we should be developing tourism and that is why we will be expanding the two airports in the countries in order to welcome large carriers in particular to promote tourism and obviously we are going to have to move in the mining sector in order to boost the Madagascar economy, fisheries also.

MS. SIDIBE: We’ll take two more questions and then you can go ahead on the Marshall question and that will be it. Two last questions please.

SPEAKER: Good morning. I’m Christian Sacrinoff from Kinshasa, Congo FM. My question is addressed in particular to the Minister of Finance and Budget of the Central African Republic and just as in the Democractic Republic of Congo it’s a very rich country in raw materials. There is a certain level of instability such as we had 10 years ago. Today the DRC doesn’t have programs with the IMF and the World Bank but has a good level of growth. If today we needed to speak about development programs for the centralized African Republic, what would they be? Would it only be developing the mining sector or perhaps focus more on development with the private sector? A lot is said about this, for instance SME’s that create more wealth and require less large investments.

SPEAKER: Hello, ministers. I’m from Lagos, Nigeria, my name is Adetola. I just wanted to find out the theme for this year’s spring meeting is ending extreme poverty and in Africa that is one of the main challenges that we have. Poverty. Especially from the minister from Madagascar, the UNDP said that about 50 percent of the population is below the average poverty level. How are you planning right now to help these people to move away from this poverty level before 2030, which is the plan of the World Bank? Thank you.

MS. SIDIBE: Thank you, Mr. Konneh you can address the Marshall Plan question that was asked earlier and then Minister Assane and Minister Rakotoarimanana can take the Madagascar question, thank you.

MR. KONNEH: Well Phillip asked a question about a Marshall Plan for Africa. I’m not sure if there’s one but if there is one we are going to really have to focus it on infrastructure like my colleague from the Central Africa Republic said earlier. We all know the famous Marshall Plan was crafted in response to rebuilding Europe after World War II. It was a postwar response effort. I’m not sure if the entire Africa is going through a war now. The problem is if I can dovetail to the last question dealing with this poverty issue it’s our war and it is a war that my generation have lived through and we’re going have to find an innovative way to deal with it.

And the way to do it in our humble opinion is to do what the rich countries did. To get their people out of poverty. The prescriptions are there. You just need to invest in an infrastructure, particularly energy, when you can bring down the cost of energy and it is consistent. The hair braider, the hair dresser, the barber shops and all the other small people that depend on energy to make a living will thrive. Even the people that make a living doing agriculture will also do it. We have to move towards value addition. And value addition--we can cry from now until judgment day about poverty in Africa--it’s not going to end until we do certain things and the major thing to do is to make sure that the continent has reliable cheap electricity.

If you have cheap electricity and you have light manufacturing propping up in this growing Africa. Africa’s growth balanced out the world growth when we had the banking crisis. We are growing and this issue of China growth, when China depends on the commodities that come from Africa it’s just –- for me it’s contradictory. We are a developing country, we have commodities but we cannot add value to the commodities because we don’t have energy, we don’t have electricity. The Marshall Plan we need really is to go beyond boundaries, beyond geography, geographical boundaries and begin to take original approach to solving this problem.

We have this hydro potential in the DRC that we are working with the World Bank on the African nations to see if we can have a dam there that can support the majority of Africa. We are doing the same thing in Guinea with this potential. Our thinking is that if we can focus for the next few years on solving the energy problems in Africa, I think we will have removed 50 percent of the binding constraint of dealing with this poverty question and I think this is where we need to put our energy and our resources.

MS. SIDIBE: Thank you Minister Konneh, Minister Assane? Quickly because we only have one minute left. Thank you.

MR. ASSANE: Thank you very much. I’ll be very, very brief. I see that the topic of these meetings is to get rid of extreme poverty but you know when it comes to the CAR extreme poverty leads to instability everywhere in Africa and especially in the Central African Republic. It’s poverty that feeds into insecurity, so we’ve got to develop strategies to put an end to poverty and that fits into our topic for today. When it comes to the question from our colleague from the DRC it is true that the DRC has made significant progress especially at the macroeconomic level and in the past you’ve had the support of the International Monetary Fund for that. And you’re implementing a very important program. When it comes to the Central African Republic, before we had a poverty reduction strategy document before the crisis before 2012 and in 2013 after the coup d’état and the crisis, we had to develop a sustainable development urgent program which we are now implementing.

We are working with the IMF and we are working with the Extended Credit Facility getting help from the IMF in 2014 and we got that support from the IMF and that has been a catalyst and a driver to mobilize resources from partner groups. We’ve had a chance to thank the countries and the partners who helped us in 2014 such as Angola, Congo, the IMF, the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the World Bank and the UNVP. They have all helped us a great deal. Once we have our elections we’ll be able to come up with a solid economic program to exploit mining, agriculture, our timber resources and other national resources we have. But right now we are focusing on reconciliation of the elections to be able to get out of this spiral of violence. I thank you very much.

MS. SIDIBE: Minister Rakotoarimanana?

MR: RAKATOARIMANANAN: With regard to poverty and to answer the question of the reporter as I’ve said before, since 80 percent of Madagascar’s work is in agriculture we need to develop that sector by developing infrastructure and by getting support to get seeds in order to reduce poverty. Obviously when it comes to poverty there are also social programs financed by the World Bank and access to health is another program that we are going to be implementing with the World Bank in order to fight against poverty as well. As I said before it’s always the private sector that has to provide jobs and that will help us to really overcome past difficulties.

MS. SIDIBE: I want to thank you. This is the end of this press conference. Please note that the webcast of the conference will be available on the IMF website at www.IMF.org. Thank you for coming. Good day.

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