The Radisson Blu Hotel in Dakar hosted a breakfast meeting this Monday, May 14, 2018, organized by the Fonds Africain de Garantie et de Coopération Economique (FAGACE) in the presence of Senegalese financial players around the theme: “FAGACE 2.0, a strategy built around banks and SFDs”.
According to Mrs. Minafou COULIBALY-KONE, Managing Director of the Fund, the aim of this meeting is to boost financing for Senegalese SME-SMIs to support the country’s inclusive growth.
To this end, discussions with the banks were frank and constructive.
After taking stock of the challenges faced by FAGACE in recent years, the presentation revealed that major reforms have been implemented, under the impetus of its new Managing Director, to be more in line with developments in the financial market and the expectations of African small and medium-sized enterprises.
With the new 2017-2020 strategic plan, known as FAGACE 2.0, presented, the institution is refocusing on guaranteeing bank financing for SMEs, which account for 80% of the private sector’s financing needs in the 14 member countries.
With this in mind, since 2017, the Fund has undertaken to strengthen its equity capital, set up a new organization focused on risk analysis and management, as well as a new, more transparent and efficient governance, designed to restore its credibility with banks in light of their greater role at the heart of the Fund’s new product distribution scheme. From now on, “we must work together, with our interests aligned at every stage, to successfully finance SMEs”, recommended the Managing Director.
She reaffirmed that “lending banks need institutional guarantors like FAGACE to mitigate the risk of default by project promoters. Similarly, guarantors need banks to fulfill their mission of facilitating the mobilization of financial resources”.
All these measures are a strong signal to Senegal’s financial partners, for a new and fruitful cooperation.
The bankers present said they had taken good note of the insights provided by FAGACE, and hoped to see the new strategy deployed in the field. It must be said that one of the challenges of the Dakar meeting, the seventh to bring together bankers and guarantors from the various member countries, was precisely to restore confidence between the parties, and to gather the opinions of these partners with a view to drawing up the FAGACE-banks and decentralized financial systems agreement that is to govern the new partnership from now on.
“We must have confidence in FAGACE. It’s a solid, resilient institution, with no solvency or liquidity problems. It is an instrument for development, and it is our collective responsibility to work towards its success”, emphasized the Fund’s Managing Director, before concluding the proceedings.
The quality of the debates and the commitments made by the parties to a new beginning augur well for a true partnership in which all parties stand to gain.
FAGACE is one of Africa’s pioneering bank credit guarantee institutions. Over the past 40 years, the Fund has contributed more than 1,500 billion FCFA to the financing of development projects in strategic sectors of the economies of its fourteen (14) member states.
To date, 48 development projects in Senegal have benefited from the Fund’s guarantee, in priority sectors such as agriculture, industry and energy, and telecommunications, and have mobilized more than 193 billion FCFA in financing for the country’s economy.
