African microfinance week 2021

The con­fer­ence was organ­ised in part­ner­ship with ADA and sev­er­al region­al micro­fi­nance net­works, and was attend­ed by over 700 experts (rep­re­sent­ing 53 coun­tries, includ­ing 37 African coun­tries). In the pres­ence of Franz Fay­ot, Min­is­ter for Devel­op­ment Coop­er­a­tion and Human­i­tar­i­an Affairs, the event con­sti­tut­ed the first meet­ing of key play­ers in the sec­tor since the begin­ning of the pan­dem­ic. Through this bian­nu­al event, Lux­em­bourg was once again able to con­tribute its exper­tise for use on the African con­ti­nent, as was the case two years ago in Oua­gadougou, Burk­i­na Faso. Dur­ing the vis­it, Franz Fay­ot and Uzziel Ndag­i­ji­mana, Rwanda’s Min­is­ter for Finance and Eco­nom­ic Plan­ning, also signed a mem­o­ran­dum of under­stand­ing on the devel­op­ment of a finan­cial cen­tre in Kigali. Four poten­tial areas of coop­er­a­tion were iden­ti­fied: capac­i­ty-build­ing to pro­mote employ­a­bil­i­ty in the finan­cial sec­tor, the devel­op­ment of sus­tain­able finance and the set­ting up of both a fin­tech ecosys­tem and an impact invest­ment market.