Afrexim Bank reiterates commitment to promotion of Intra-African trade

The African Export-Import Bank has reiterated its commitment to promote Intra-African trade on the African continent.
The President of Afrexim Bank, Benedict Oramah, said this at a news conference on Wednesday in Abuja.
According to Oramah, the bank has a new strategy in Nigeria called “Impact 2021 African transformed” which was inaugurated in January.
According to him, the strategy is keyed on three pillars of intra-African trade, industrialisation and export manufacturing, and trade finance leadership.
Oramah said the bank planned at disbursing about 25 billion dollars in support of intra-African trade and had created a unit called intra-African trade initiative headed by a Nigerian to drive the process.
He said the bank was working at promoting intra-trade information and would also formalise the informal intra-African trade which was estimated at about 40 billion dollars today.
“We want it to serve as a platform that will make it possible for people to pay for intra-African trade in their local currencies.
“The software for that project is being developed, we are hoping to launch it before the end of the year and we expect that by next year, it will be rolled out and we think it will make a big impact,’’ Oramah said.
He added that the bank was making efforts to promote export trading companies across Africa, as well as develop a regulatory framework for those companies.
According to him, the bank will soon create an industrial park and extra processing zones to solve the problem of shortage of infrastructure that will make export manufacturing competitive in Africa. r a multinational framework.