Africa Needs 640 Billion US Dollars to Reduce Poor People by Half: Official

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Wednesday, March 05, 2003

Africa Needs 640 Billion US Dollars to Reduce Poor People by Half: Official

Africa would need 640 billion US dollars in the next 10 years to reduce the number of its poor people by half, a high-ranking Nigerian official said Tuesday in the capital Abuja.

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Africa would need 640 billion US dollars in the next 10 years to reduce the number of its poor people by half, a high-ranking Nigerian official said Tuesday in the capital Abuja.

"We will need an injection of capital of 64 billion dollars a year for the next 10 years to bring down the number of people who live under one dollar a day by half," said Chinyere Asika, senior special assistant to President Olusegun Obasanjo on the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD).

Asika, who is also chief executive officer of NEPAD Nigeria, said that the project was part of a set of millennium development goals aimed at achieving a 7-percent growth in the economies of African countries in the next decade.

"There are a set of millennium development goals we have to achieve if we are to reduce poverty on the continent by half by year 2015," she said.

On how such huge sum of money would be raised, she said "our presidents (of African countries) are saying that if they (developed countries) do not charge us so much money to service ourdebt and maybe cancel our debts, half of the money would have beenrealized."

She however said that NEPAD was working on the other conditionsgiven to it by its development partners, especially as it concerned sanitization of the economic and financial sector.

"The condition they gave was in the area of economic and cooperate performance, because they say we are famous for economiccrimes. So we have to sanitize the economic and financial sector, so that whoever wants to invest in Africa will feel secure," she said.

Asika emphasized the need to set up institutions that would be in control of capital mobilized because "once we show signs that we can mobilize capital and create institutions that are transparent, the G-8 countries say they will come and invest."

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