UK Commits to Channeling IMF Reserves Through Top African Lender
- AfDB to leverage rich nation’s reserves to help African states
- Bank in talks with Canada, France over Special Drawing Rights
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The UK agreed to channel its rights to International Monetary Fund reserve assets through the African Development Bank to help raise funding for poorer countries, the head of the continent’s biggest multilateral lender said.
While the IMF last year allocated a record $650 billion of so-called Special Drawing Rights, or SDRs, to mitigate the impact of the coronavirus on the global economy, African nations received only $33 billion -- as much as France and Italy combined, and less than half of what the US received. That’s because allocations were based on predetermined quotas, which took factors such as the size of countries’ economies into account.