Together with our partners the African Development Bank, the German Economic Development Cooperation (implemented by GIZ), the Making
Finance Work for Africa (MFW4A) and Centre for Affordable Housing, we recently launched a country diagnostic report on long-term finance (LTF) in Côte d’Ivoire.

This country report focuses on infrastructure, housing, and enterprise finance in Côte d’Ivoire and applies a flexible definition of LTF that reflects the differing productive life of assets being financed, which may vary from 20 to 30 years in the infrastructure and housing sectors and 5 years or less for enterprises.

Given scarce fiscal resources and the underdeveloped status of domestic financial markets, the report identifies sizable long-term financing gaps in the infrastructure, housing, and enterprise sectors.

The Africa Long-Term Finance (LTF) Initiative seeks to rebalance the focus toward this perspective by (a) assembling data and establishing an “LTF Scoreboard,” on which individual countries are benchmarked against one another on the availability of LTF, and (b) undertaking country diagnostics in a number of African countries to identify specific hurdles faced in deepening markets for LTF and ways such hurdles could be overcome. This report is the first of these country-diagnostic reports.

We started the Africa LTF Initiative to assemble information about the provision of LTF across countries in Africa as well as to provide guidance as to how the public and private sectors can work together in strengthening the provision of LTF.