Browsing: SDR

• The IMF’s support fund refers to the designated Special Drawing Right (SDR), which serves as an international reserve asset to supplement the official reserves of its member nations.
• It represents a potential claim on the members’ freely usable currencies, primarily intended to provide liquidity to a nation in the event of an economic crisis.
• As of September, Kenya’s SDR quota at the IMF stood at US$542.8 million, equivalent to KSh91.8 billion.

Leaders from developing countries continue to pursue the implementation of the proposed re-channeling of the IMF’s support fund through development banks, aiming for affordability and increased impact scale.

This was evident on the sidelines of the recent COP28 summit, where African leaders emphasized the acceleration of the process towards realizing the proposal. The summit took place between November 30 and December 12 last year in Dubai.

Proposal: IMF’s support fund to come through AfDB

African Development Bank (AfDB) Group …

An action plan totalling US$40 billion in trade finance, commercial investments, and a share of Chinese SDRs was announced at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (Focac) in late November (SDR).

Despite the eye-catching headline, the actual amount pledged at the two most recent forums in 2015 and 2018 is far less than the US$60bn promised.

China has used concessional loans to fund a wide range of continent-wide infrastructure projects, including trains, airports, highways, and power plants.…