Mr Singh, AFRITAC South Coordinator and Director of Africa Training Institute and co-chair of this Annual Coordination Committee

Colleagues from IMF Washington

AFRITAC centre Directors

Colleagues from IMF and ATI

My colleague Mrs Vivien Rigler from European Commission International Partnerships Directorate

Ladies and Gentlemen

Good afternoon to all of you and good morning to those in Washington.  It gives me great pleasure to address you all today for this very first annual coordination meeting for our joint programme called Improving Economic Governance in Africa – also known as ECOGOVA.

• I am pleased to co-chair this meeting with the Director of AFS/ATI today. Some of you may know, some not, but the ECOGOVA agreement is managed by the EU Delegation in Mauritius.  The joint chairmanship is a good indication of our commitment to work together for this innovative contract that we signed in 2023.

• As you all know, in June 2023 the EU provided EUR 50 million contribution to all the IMF Regional Technical Assistance Centres in Africa and the Africa Training Institute to support continued progress in Sub-Saharan Africa countries in reforms related to economic governance.

• The EU has a long-standing partnership with the IMF on capacity development, and our contributions to various programmes of the IMF at global level totals about  EUR 350 million up to now. The IMF’s work and goes hand-in-hand with the EU's budget support, guarantees, and blending programmes, offering practical solutions to assist our partner countries.

• By supporting reforms in fiscal policies and ensuring macroeconomic stability, the IMF helps to create an environment where both private and public investments can support sustainable development.

• This is also what we are striving for with our Global Gateway strategy, which is the EU’s contribution to narrowing the global investment gap worldwide.

• The Africa-Europe Global Gateway Investment Package worth of EUR 150 billion in investments by 2027 aims to build more diversified, sustainable, and resilient economies
• And the synergies with the work of IMF are plenty.
• Together we are aiming to support our partners in creating capable and strong economic institutions, which is not only underpinned by the need of sustainable investments, but even more crucial given the highly concerning undemocratic developments in the Sahel and the wider continent.
• This action aims to assist our partner countries in Sub-Saharan Africa in building resilience and implementing reforms and policies in the core areas of economic governance that promote climate change adaptation and mitigation, as well as gender equality.
• Our action is highly flexible, and it is designed to improve allocative efficiency and help to address escalating fragilities in Sub-Saharan Africa and comes at a critical time for the region.

The agreement has been signed since May 2023, and almost two years into the implementation,  notable results are already visible.  I would like to mention a few:

1. The IMF is now more methodical on monitoring and evaluation: the Results Based Monitoring (RBM) framework is updated on a regular basis by an RBM Officer specifically recruited under this centre since end of 2023.  OPSYS encoding of logframe has been completed in the first quarter of 2024 and a further update is scheduled soon.  Later this afternoon we will have a presentation of the main results as per the RBM framework.
2. The ECOGOVA agreement provided for mission notifications to countries covered by RTACS by the IMF to the EU.  Considerable progress has been made by all centres in this regard, and I wish to thank all centre directors and resident advisers for this key progress.  Therefore, the coordination between the EU and the IMF regional technical assistance centres is now much more fruitful and collaborative.  For example in Lesotho, EU and IMF are coordinating their support to the Central Bank of Lesotho by regular interactions between AFRITAC South and the EUD in Lesotho.
3. The ECOGOVA agreement provided for priority to be given climate change and gender in the implementation of the IMF workstreams. A number of seminars on climate change have been organised by Africa Training Institute since 2023.  These concern namely climate change statistics, Climate in Macroeconomic Frameworks , etc
4. On gender, the IMF keeps statistics on trainees by gender, has positive discrimination for women participants in seminars, organises training on issues like Gender Equality and Macroeconomics.

• There are many more results.  I will not extend on them now, but we will have the opportunity to discuss the main highlights  of our cooperation over the course of the day.

 Thank you for your kind attention.