New Africa Regional Technical Assistance Centre to be created in Accra

Mr. Seth Terkper, Finance Minister, and Ms. Nemat Shafik, Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have signed a memorandum of understanding to establish a new Africa Regional Technical Assistance Centre (AFRITAC) in the capital Accra in late 2013.

The centre, known as AFRITAC West 2, will serve Cape Verde, The Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone -- complementing a network of existing AFRITACs in Gabon, Tanzania, Côte d’Ivoire, and Mauritius.

“AFRITAC West 2 will be the IMF’s ninth regional technical assistance centre worldwide and fifth centre in sub-Saharan Africa, fulfilling our commitment to extend the AFRITAC network to all sub-Saharan African countries,” Ms. Shafik said at the signing ceremony in Washington, DC.

“Regional technical assistance centres have become a staple of the IMF’s capacity development efforts, covering a large group of low- and middle-income countries and delivering an increasing share of our overall technical assistance.
 

The centres are flexible, and their staffs know well the potential and challenges of the environments in which they operate. This contributes to delivering effective, responsive, realistic, and sustainable technical assistance as well as ‘good value for money’ to both recipient countries and the donors that support them,” Ms. Shafik said.

“The approach adopted for the operations and governance structure of AFRITAC West 2 will allow us to obtain demand-driven, hands-on advice in a rapidly changing world where predictability has increasingly become an issue,” Mr. Terkper said.

“I am confident that this flexible approach and the availability of immediate, high-level expertise for many years to come will help policymakers in the AFRITAC West 2 member-countries formulate even better responses to our economic and financial challenges.”

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