Former Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has commended the Africa Investment Forum for its role in helping overcome Africa’s $42 billion gender gap in access to finance.
Johnson Sirleaf spoke via video link during an event organized by the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) to mark Women's Month. The former president holds a seat on the DFC’s International Advisory Board.
Johnson Sirleaf said the disparity in male and female entrepreneurs’ access to finance is “suffocating the innovation and silencing the voices of some of Africa’s brightest minds,”
Johnson Sirleaf said she wished to shine a spotlight on the Africa Investment Forum, an initiative of the African Development Bank and eight partners, The Africa Investment Forum is a multi-stakeholder, multi-disciplinary platform that advances private and public-private-partnership projects to bankability, raises capital, and accelerates deals to financial closure.
Johnson Sirleaf cited the virtual Market Days event held by the Africa Investment Forum in March 2022, which “secured $32.8 billion in investment commitments for projects across the continent, with a significant focus on growing women businesses.” Market Days features boardroom sessions that bring together investors, deal sponsors, brokers and government representatives to advance transformational deals toward closure.
Under its Women as Investment Champions initiative, The Africa Investment Forum prioritizes supporting businesses that are women-owned, women-led and gender influenced.
During the virtual Market Days, a ‘Women as Investment Champions’ boardroom session showcased four transformative women-led or women-centred transactions with a potential value of nearly $5 billion:
(1) An essential care small enterprise that is looking to scale up production through expansion of its Shea Butter essential care products range with a focus on the East African regional market;
(2) development of a sustainable and organic dried fruit and nut processing facility in a West Africa country;
(3) a medium enterprise with plans to build a world class tannery processing plant in West Africa. that will produce Sokoto red leather; and
(4) creation of a digital textile printing facility by a well-established fashion house that will offer digital printing, manufacture and designing of a wide range of fabrics.
Johnson Sirleaf also praised the Africa Investment Forum’s Senior Director Chinelo Anohu, as a dynamic African woman leader.
The former leader also stressed that the Market Days event underscored that economic empowerment and political empowerment are inherently linked.
The Africa Investment Forum’s eight founding partners are the African Development Bank, Africa 50; the Africa Finance Corporation; the African Export-Import Bank; the Development Bank of Southern Africa; the Trade and Development Bank; the European Investment Bank; and the Islamic Development Bank.
See the video statement by President Johnson Sirleaf.
