Africa-Press – Tanzania. TANZANIA is attending a meeting of African countries that is expected to come up with a joint method of convincing the World Bank and International Monetary Funds (IMF) to support the continent on constructing digital infrastructures in a bid to mitigate the economic effects brought by the Covoid-19 pandemic.
The meeting, which has brought together Ministers for Finance and Economy together with governors of central banks from 54 African countries, is held in Bujumbura, the capital city of Burundi.
Deputy Minister for Finance and Planning Mr Hamad Masauni is attending the meeting on behalf of the Minister Dr Mwigulu Nchemba and the Governor of Bank of Tanzania (BoT) Prof Florens Luoga.
From the meeting, participants are expected to come up with a joint agreement on securing funds from global financial institutions, to be spent on facing technological advancement especially in the areas of online business, digital economy as well as building digital infrastructures that would cover rural and urban areas.
Going by the theme; ‘Digitalisation for inclusive recovery and sustainable growth’, the meeting is held ahead of the annual general meeting of the WB and the IMF scheduled for October this year.
“At the end of the meeting, we shall come up with the declaration and priorities of African continent on how the IMF and WB would support Africa in securing funds and friendly policies to enable our citizens to effectively participate in economic activities,” said the deputy minister.
Mr Msauni was of the view that there is a positive response to technological advancement among the youth, noting it was high time for them to be supported, a move that would play a role in reducing unemployment and improving people’s living standard. He also spoke on the importance of generating power from low cost sources such as water and natural gas that, according to him, increase supply of electricity at affordable cost.
“Reliability of electricity has a role to play in building the digital economy, as a result of fast tracking provision of social services in urban and rural areas,” noted the deputy minister.
According to him, the inaccessibility to electricity in Africa has denied access to the internet for a total of 1.3 billion people in the continent, a situation he said, must be addressed.
Already, the WB has approved a 150 million dollars (about 348bn/-) soft loan to finance a project aimed at increasing access to high-quality broadband internet services for government, businesses, and citizens as well as improving government’s capacity to deliver public services digitally.
“Our target is to provide 80 per cent of Tanzanians with access to the internet for them to use Information Communication Technology (ICT) in their economic activities, thus increasing the contribution of the sector on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to three per cent from the current 1.5 per cent,” he noted.
In attendance to the meeting that was inaugurated by the President of Burundi Evariste Ndaishimiye was the deputy Permanent Secretary of Ministry of Finance and Planning Amina Khamis Shaaban and the Zanzibar’s Deputy Permanent Secretary President’s Office Finance and Planning Mr Aboud Hassan Mwinyi.
