NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, August 27, 2019

French President Emmanuel Macron and G7 leaders on Sunday approved a package totalling $251 million in support of the African Development Bank’s AFAWA initiative to support women entrepreneurs in Africa.

“I am particularly proud, as the current G7 president, that the programme we are supporting today, the AFAWA initiative, comes from an African organisation, the African Development Bank, which works with African guarantee funds and a network of African banks,” Macron stated at a press conference at the G7 Summit in Biarritz, France.

The risk-sharing mechanism used by AFAWA (Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa) is a practical approach to international commitments. It is a direct response to the demand by women to ease access to financing, specifically on the need to establish a financing mechanism for women’s economic empowerment, adopted during a summit of African heads of state in 2015 and assigned to the African Development Bank for implementation.

Photo courtesy of Commonwealth Secretariat.