Adaptation of Cambridge Fintech Regulatory and Innovation Online Programme for Africa (CFTRI Africa)

CCAF in collaboration with Cambridge Judge Business School Executive Education delivers the Cambridge Fintech and Regulatory Innovation (CFTRI) global executive online programme. The CFTRI programme is designed to enable global executives, financial regulators, supervisors and policymakers to understand the mechanics and applications of key innovative technologies employed in fintech firms, evaluate fintech business models and respective regulatory and policy implications and responses, utilise analytical tools to assess fintech business models aligned with national objectives and capabilities and assess the viability and suitability of an array of regulatory innovation initiatives and responses.

FSD Africa partnered with CCAF to contextualise the CFTRI programme to Africa and help them launch it in February 2022, as well as to provide scholarships for participants in the first cohort.

Africa Green Finance Coalition (AGFC)

By 2030, African nations need to invest $3 trillion to tackle their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for climate change priorities. Domestic and international public and private climate finance needs to be mobilised at scale and fast.

The Africa Green Finance Coalition is a new initiative designed to fast-track African economies’ political will and efforts to mobilise and invest large volumes of green investment. The AGFC platform will enable African governments to pool resources, share learning and create a pathway for increased domestic and international flows of green investment capital to the continent.

Aiming for a formal launch at COP27 in Egypt, the AGFC platform will enable African governments to collaborate in designing future-proof climate finance regulations, policies, incentives, institutions and investment portfolios at scale.

Africa Pensions Supervisors’ Network Programme

Africa’s pension assets represent less than 1% of global assets, with a pension coverage of only 9.6%, putting a significant percentage of the elderly at risk of old age poverty.

The Programme aims to support holistic interventions that will ultimately encourage long-term (retirement) savings and create facilitative policy, regulatory and industry environment to support appropriate deployment and investment of the pension assets into the real sector. The Programme will convene pension sector actors across Africa to resolve common challenges in SSA’ pensions sector.

The interventions will ultimately encourage long-term savings, appropriate deployment, and investment of pension assets. The initiative also aims to increase pension literacy and awareness of retirement products and investments.

Africa Private Equity and Debt Programme

A pan-Africa programme that aims to support the development of private capital markets in Africa to complement public markets.

The programme’s overarching goal is to improve the availability of long-term financing for priority social and economic sectors in Africa by mobilising private equity and debt capital. Overall, the programme seeks to increase local institutional (particularly pension fund) investor participation in private equity and debt in the continent to complement development finance institutions’ financing.

The programme aims to achieve this through:

• Creating a facilitative enabling environment by working with regulators to put in place regulations and policies to enable private equity and debt investments by relevant institutional investors;
• Working with market participants on demonstration transactions that provide an avenue or vehicle for such investments
• Capacity and knowledge development of relevant stakeholders, research, advocacy and impact reporting.

Africa Regulatory Support Programme

The capacity of key institutions such as ministries of finance, central banks and capital market authorities to develop, monitor and enforce financial policies and regulations is critical to developing robust, competitive and ultimately poverty-reducing capital markets. However, many of Africa’s regulators grapple with inadequate financing and human resource capacity gaps, resulting in outdated regulatory and supervision technologies and frameworks. These challenges hinder the development of African capital markets to facilitate efficient allocation of long-term capital. To address these challenges, ARSP extends technical assistance to regional securities regulators on: capacity assessment and strengthening, development of capital market development masterplans and strategic plans, regulatory frameworks for collective investment schemes, Islamic capital market products, and knowledge management products on listings and sustainability-related disclosures.

Africa Regulatory Support Programme II (ARSP II)

ARSP II focuses on supporting regulators and policymakers in developing the right policy and regulatory environment for the mobilisation of green and sustainable finance at scale.

The programme is a ‘Green Plus’ programme, aimed at:

1. Supporting policy and regulatory reform through the development of regulatory frameworks that promote the mobilisation of sustainable and green finance through thematic instruments, capital market master plan development and policy support to ministries of finance.
2. Strengthening sustainability reporting mechanisms through the development of ESG frameworks and supporting the implementation of IFRS S1 and S2 standards (on sustainability-related and climate-related reporting, respectively).
3. Enhancing monitoring and supervision of the growing pools of regulated investment funds through the conduct of a targeted regulatory landscape analysis on collective investment schemes and alternative investment funds as well as technical support for the onboarding of appropriate regtech/suptech regulatory solutions to monitor fund performance. 
4. Knowledge management and peer learning through focused research and regional regulator roundtables to ensure that insights and lessons learned are shared with the project beneficiaries and wider audiences.  

BimaLab – Neo Insurers Training Initiative

NITI will involve training of selected incumbent insurance companies with intended development of a digital insurer and digital sandbox concept in Nigeria. In Africa, risk markets remain nascent, competition minimal, and incumbents sluggish at innovating. Many incumbent insurance companies use the term “digital transformation” to refer to any initiative that uses digital technology to conduct business however most of these companies are still far from implementing digital solutions. The goal of the training initiative is to push incumbent traditional insurer to become a digital insurer through development of an innovation hub within the company. The innovation hub will apply digital sandbox mechanisms to test the solutions with targeted interactions from the regulator

Watch the interview: Insurtchs in Kenya: Insurtchs aims expands reach of insurance in Kenya

BimaLab West Africa

BimaLab is a platform that will be hosted by the insurance regulators with the support of FSD Africa, that attracts, inspires and organises key players and disruptors across the financial industry and technologies to collaborate on ground-breaking, innovative insurance products and services. The overall goal of the program is to create an Insurtech ecosystem for growth and strategic partnerships.

The program has the following objectives:

• Foster innovation that can extend access to insurance products and services to communities and businesses that are historically underserved or excluded.
• Turn validated insurance-focused ideas to market and investor-ready
• Provide innovators with an enabling regulatory environment for developing their ideas, including support in starting out, training, mentorship, and coaching.
• Facilitate the effective exchange of information relating to deepening access to financial services and opportunities for entrepreneurs across Africa.
• Create new networks and strengthen existing networks leading to strategic partnerships

Watch the interview: Insurtchs in Kenya: Insurtchs aims expands reach of insurance in Kenya

Building Digital Finance Capacity in Sub-Saharan Africa

FSD Africa co-funded the incubation of DFI commencing in 2016 and leading to its establishment in 2018. This support, and our subsequent co-funding since 2018 (Phase II) has helped DFI to realise its 5-year plan to build a sustainable institute training 4000+ professionals and supporting their continual growth through an online community, knowledge resources and physical country-level presence. Through this work DFI have facilitated the establishment of 10 registered professional country digital finance associations in Africa as well as the formation of the Alliance for Digital Finance Associations (ADFA), an international platform for networking, partnerships, and collaboration between association members, local and international organisations working within the digital finance and financial inclusion space.

In 2021 we worked with them to design and deliver a new Inclusive Digital Economy Development course (iDED), which introduces digital finance professionals to the different facets of the digital economy and what they mean in terms of inclusive growth. We have extended our scholarship offering for DFI’s iDED, Certificate in Digital Money (CIDM) and (Certified Digital Finance Practitioner Programme (CDFP) in our priority countries.

Catalysing Climate Resilience (CCR)

The CCR programme encompasses three integrated core components:

1. TECA (Triggering Exponential Climate Action): A venture launcher for seeding and incubating bold new climate resilience solutions, developing ideas into viable businesses.
2. Catalyst Fund: Accelerating the growth of promising climate resilience solutions and creating the demonstration models to attract further capital
3. Ecosystem Development: Building the wider innovation ecosystem to achieve the leverage necessary for systemic acceleration of digital innovations for adaptation and resilience.

Uniting these three components is a shared set of underlying investment theses: products and services that help vulnerable households and businesses manage, adapt, and build resilience to climate change.

Climate Finance Training Programme

Establish a twinning arrangement between the UK and Kenyan/East African/African academic institutions to provide climate finance training to develop the capacity of local and regional policymakers, academia, regulators and financial market participants.

Digital Financial Innovation Platform

This intervention aims to increase the number of accessible and affordable insurance products across Sub-Saharan Africa, through the active development of insurtech ecosystems. The mechanism for achieving this is an online Digital Innovation Platform – creating a digitally-based ecosystem that enables the next-generation of insurtechs to develop a pipeline of scalable, regionally replicable use cases. The platform will be a ‘one-stop innovation shop’, with an ecosystem of insurtech partners using the online space to connect, collaborate, host events, ideate,incubate and accelerate viable ideas, store content and learn.

To pilot the project , we have worked on creating a digital BimaLab- an incubation program for insurtechs , to allow the program to continue to support the startups beyond the lifetime of the incubation cycle through engagement with incumbents, regulators, mentors and investors.

Digitisation of humanitarian and government social payments

Phase I of the project surveyed the landscape of delivery mechanisms used to disburse humanitarian cash payments and government social protection payments in Nigeria. It assessed the state of mobile financial services and digitally enabled payments. A report documenting the survey findings and recommendations was published and shared with stakeholders in May 2021. The report covered humanitarian and government cash transfer payment flows, findings covering the regulator, service providers & agents as well as humanitarian and government agencies. The report also provided a separate implementation roadmap with four overarching factors that can contribute to an ideal scenario where unrestricted cash transfers can be delivered to a digital wallet in an open-loop payment ecosystem. This roadmap formed the basis for phase II where working groups were formed bringing together interested stakeholders to develop concept notes that can be considered to drive the digitisation of cash transfer payments.

Phase II was concluded in December 2022 with the publication of 4 detailed concept notes developed in consultation with humanitarian and government payment stakeholders in Nigeria. The concept notes are now available to interested humanitarian actors, government agencies and donors for implementation.

Enhancing the digital payment ecosystem

Under the project, Strategic Impact Advisors (SIA) supported Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) in reviewing the results of the GSMA Connectivity Needs and Usage Assessment (CoNUA) for White Nile and West Darfur in Sudan. SIA further undertook financial service provider mapping, analysed key barriers and opportunities for both supply and demand market actors, and provided revenue potential analysis. SIA made presentations of the results to stakeholders in a workshop in May 2022. These sessions led to a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities in providing digital financial products to displaced populations specifically in West Darfur and White Nile. The findings provide inputs to humanitarian and private sector actors on how they could drive digital payments to hard-to-reach communities in Sudan.

Ethiopia Central Securities Depository (CSD) System

This Project aims to support the National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) in acquiring and implementing a Central Securities Depository and Settlement (CSD) System. NBE will initially utilise the CSD system for government securities, with the ability for the system to be scaled for corporate debt securities, equities, and funds.

The CSD will ensure the safe custody of securities, ensure accurate record-keeping and reporting, reduce transaction costs, minimise risk, improve efficiency in the transfer of securities, facilitate the implementation of corporate actions, and improve the integrity of transactions. The CSD will promote increased liquidity and turnover in securities markets, increase transparency, and enhance investor confidence. An efficient and effective capital market will attract diverse investors, including foreign investors, increasing the volume and diversity of trades in Ethiopia’s capital markets.

Ethiopia Licensing Framework

This project aims to develop a policy and regulatory framework for the licensing and regulation of capital market service providers and self-regulatory organisations in Ethiopia.

Financial Inclusion Using Agency Banking Project

Through this partnership, FSD Africa is supporting Equity BCDC to increase access to unbanked populations in rural and peri-urban areas of DRC by scaling up its agency banking model, providing savings and loan products and building capacity of farmers, MSMEs, women and youth. FSD Africa’s support includes building of institutional capacity at the bank and the establishment of agents. Through Equity Bank BCDC’s market leadership in DRC it seeks to demonstrate the business case for serving unserved and underserved customers.

Forcibly Displaced Persons (FDP) Programme

The programme promotes development and delivery of financial services for refugees and other Forcibly Displaced Persons (FDP) communities in Uganda, Rwanda, and DRC. The services developed are intended to link directly into survival and livelihood strategies of these communities and help shift the paradigm from humanitarian-based to market-based solutions. It also promotes the financial inclusion of host communities.

Geothermal Risk Transfer Facility

The programme will leverage local insurance capital to de-risk renewable energy development and thereby catalyse private investment into green energy projects in Africa. This will be done through establishing a joint underwriting facility, backed by East African insurers, to initially cover the early-stage development drilling risk for investors in geothermal projects. Furthermore, this underwriting facility should further develop to cover other speciality risks in the renewable energy sector and the broader climate mitigation & adaptation sector in Africa.

The programme will implement the following work:

1. Technical capacity development and facilitation of East African insurance sector stakeholders
2. Advocacy and technical assistance on regulatory adaptation
3. Support to structuring and execution of a joint underwriting facility
4. Advocacy and technical support to fundraising from African investors for geothermal investment

Investing in a digital carbon marketplace (Cavex)

Cavex is a cloud-based digital marketplace that will facilitate the collection, verification and monitoring of data on climate positive actions from small projects and facilitate trading through a transparent pricing model. This will enable numerous small, accurately measured projects that wouldn’t have the scale nor resources to go through tailored expert evaluation to participate in carbon credit trading and access climate financing.

In the early phases of this project, FSD Africa provided grant funding to 4RDigital to develop a proof of concept and detailed use cases for Cavex with the aim of improving market infrastructure to facilitate the scaling up of voluntary carbon markets. Following successful concept development, we have provided pre-seed capital to support the build out of the platform and to facilitate a future seed capital raise.

The platform is in its pre-commercial development phase. The minimum viable product is now undergoing tests with the first commercial transactions expected to occur in late 2023 / early 2024, as the project moves into end-to-end trials. The number of use cases (or projects feeding in carbon data on the ‘supply side’) has been extended to incorporate waste-to-energy and clean cooking, adding to projects already underway around reforestation, electric vehicles, distributed solar and solar irrigation. Work on the buy-side also continues, testing out purchase intent and willingness to buy from a range of potential buyers who are motivated by the potential of high quality, high impact credits, typically as part of their progress towards net zero commitments. Work is well underway on critical aspect of independent auditing with specialist organisations engaged to complete a first full audit in 2023.

Once launched, the Cavex platform will be scalable across different use cases and geographies, including across and beyond Africa.

Kenya Credit Enhancement Facility

FSD Africa is supporting the set-up of the Kenya Credit Enhancement Facility. This proposed non-bank financial institution will be set up in Kenya to facilitate the issuance of irrevocable and unconditional credit guarantees for long-term local currency debt backed by infrastructure-related projects.

This credit enhancement is expected to catalyse investment by institutional investors into corporate issuances. KCEF will provide a 100% guarantee, transferring credit risk from the sponsor to KCEF. Given the high target rating of KCEF, the wrap will enable domestic institutional investors to invest in the bonds issued by sponsors. Over time, it is expected, as has happened elsewhere, that sponsors will make repeat issuances without credit guarantees.

Kenya Green Bond Programme

This project aims to accelerate the take-up of green bonds as a tool for Kenya to tap into international and domestic capital markets to finance green projects and assets.

The project will support:

• Policy reform to promote investment instruments.
• Engagements with the institutional investment community to promote green bond issuances.
• Potential Kenyan green bond issuers to come to market.
• The development of a pool of Kenya-based licensed verifiers.
• The development of cooperative mechanisms to support access to the green bond market for smaller banks and corporates that don’t currently have access
• The development of green Islamic finance products.

Lagos Flood Resilience

The megacity of Lagos is extremely vulnerable to flooding, but Lagos State Government’s management of flood risk is currently inadequate. A significant shortcoming is the almost complete non-utilisation of market-based financial instruments to increase resilience. This dismisses the important contribution that the private financial sector can make to risk reduction (through investment in resilient infrastructure) and risk management (e.g. through insurance).

FSD Africa is supporting Lagos State Government (LASG) in utilising financial markets instruments to improve flood resilience by collaborating with commercial financial sector stakeholders. These instruments will enable disaster risk reduction (DRR, through investment in resilient infrastructure) and disaster risk financing (DRF, e.g. insurance).

FSD Africa’s support to Lagos State Government along two major lines:

1. Development and implementation of a Flood Resilience Finance Framework and Policy for Lagos State. This will define the role of the financial sector and its instruments in flood risk management.
2. Support to financial transactions (infrastructure investments, risk transfer) by businesses or public sector that would significantly improve the state’s flood resilience.

FSD Africa is collaborating closely with the Office of the Governor of Lagos State, and with several businesses in various sectors (e.g. financial sector, waste management) as well as specialist advisers and NGOs.

Long Term Finance

The overarching objective of this project was to create similar progress as regards long-term finance (LTF) in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as has been achieved in the past decade on financial inclusion. This objective was accomplished by developing an LTF scoreboard, improving the availability of public data on long-term finance markets in SSA. This project complemented similar efforts, such as the FinScope and FinAccess surveys on financial inclusion and more detailed diagnostic work produced by financial sector development (FSD) programmes across Sub-Saharan Africa.

The LTF scoreboard addresses critical information gaps for market stakeholders (donors, DFIs, private and public investors, pension funds, global Africa, frontier market funds, etc.). It makes data accessible for investment decision-makers in Africa. This data will help decision-makers identify the most effective and efficient ways to further deepen domestic markets by mobilising private resources and leveraging public funding.

This project will create greater investor confidence in the markets in Africa and catalyse new partnerships (including within the G20) in developing LT financing markets in Africa. With the German government’s (as chair of the G20) focus on LT finance, the project could mobilise multi-donor commitment for building catalytic market information on LT finance across Africa. This project will ultimately lead to more significant LT finance resource mobilisation to address Africa’s long-term social and economic challenges.

Macroeconomic and Financial Management Institute (MEFMI) Debt Management Programme

This programme aims to support the development of the government securities market in a way that will not only foster the recovery of respective economies from the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic but also build resilience and sustainability of these markets.

MEFMI, alongside respective countries, identified priority support areas such as debt sustainability analyses, development of debt databases and sovereign debt management strategies.

Morocco Green Fund

A scoping study on developing a financing offer for the green economy in Morocco

Nairobi Declaration on Sustainable Insurance

The Nairobi Declaration on Sustainable Insurance was launched by UN Environment Programme’s Principles for Sustainable Insurance Initiative (PSI) during the 4th PSI African Market Event on 22 April 2021. The event was hosted by ICEA LION Group and supported by Financial Sector Deepening Africa (FSD Africa) and African Risk Capacity. It was  established to mobilise the Africa insurance industry to support the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The Nairobi Declaration will bring together local and international Insurance firms to promote the achievement of SDGs, and make it easier for them to understand the commitment to support the achievement of the SDGs.

National Insurance Commission (NAICOM)

FSD Africa will conduct technical assistance to enhance NAICOM’s ability to fulfil its development, regulation and supervision mandate to support market development, market stability promoting innovation, and protection of policyholders. We will support market development for innovation and strengthen regulatory and supervisory frameworks in line with international standards by developing a risk-based capital framework. The technical assistance will focus on the following:

1. Support on Insurance Market Development to establish a framework for promoting innovation in the insurance industry.
2. Support on Risk-Based Capital framework development

Nigeria Green Bond Programme

To accelerate the take-up of green bonds as a tool for Nigeria to tap into domestic and international capital markets to finance green projects and assets.

OTC Securities Exchange Kenya

The Project is a technical assistance project in partnership with KBA to establish an Over-The-Counter (OTC) Bond Exchange in Kenya with a future aspiration of serving the wider East African region. The OTC Exchange will essentially serve dual roles – as a trading platform provider and as a frontline market conduct and integrity regulator. This intervention seeks to help develop the bond markets and other supporting markets such as money markets, foreign exchange, and derivative markets.

The Project has three workstreams; i) Exchange structure and model, ii) Exchange registration and licensing, and iii) Exchange operationalisation.

Pharm Access Project

This project works to improve data-quality and usage at the National Health Insurance Agency in Ghana which covers ~50% of the Ghanaian population.

Our partner, PharmAccess, supports the NHIA to drive more effective health outcomes, increased membership, and greater cost efficiency.

FSD Africa will support PharmAccess and NHIA in building and applying capabilities for data analysis that lead to adjustments in operations and provider/payer relationships.

Promoting an African voice for the Taskforce on Nature Related Disclosures (TNFD) and nature-related financial risk management

This project builds awareness and institutional capacity on nature-related financial risk management within African countries. This will support the transition towards a nature-positive economy and sustainable livelihoods, building on the growing evidence and calls for action such as that articulated in the Economics of Biodiversity: the Dasgupta Review. There is a growing need to include a strong African voice within the design stage of disclosure agreements for financial institutions and corporates. Global interest in the work of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) has been established, providing international corporate and financial institutions with a framework to map, measure, manage and report their nature-related risks. However, there is an urgent need to apply this to local African contexts and provide the awareness and capability-building support required to ensure successful implementation.

Rabobank Acorn Agroforestry Carbon Programme

Acorn has built a global, transparent, and technology-enabled marketplace for carbon sequestration to support farmers in making the transition to agroforestry at scale. The additional income generated by the carbon credits will make the transition to agroforestry more financially sustainable for the farmers.

This program presents a unique opportunity for FSD Africa to play a critical role in transitioning smallholder farmers in Africa towards more sustainable agricultural production systems whilst also potentially linking capital markets to natural capital.

Regulatory and Innovation Sandbox Implementation

FSD Africa has partnered with the Bank of Ghana to support the implementation of a regulatory innovation sandbox which was launched in 2022 and which focuses on enabling the testing of solutions targeting underserved segments of the population.

FSD Africa supported a feasibility assessment of the sandbox in 2021 that was undertaken by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.

Our support includes advisory support to the Bank as it rolls out the sandbox and engages industry stakeholders.

Risk, Resilience and Regulatory Lab (R3LAB)

R3Lab is a platform focused on addressing challenges faced by regulatory agencies through collaboration and cooperation. R3Lab platform will be developed to create an enabling regulatory environment by encouraging and facilitating regulatory and supervisory interactions between insurance regulators in Africa.  R3Lab focuses on offering customised capacity-building programs, peer-to-peer exchange platform, comprehensive learning toolkit, resource centre, data collection and reporting, and topical taskforces and forums for insurance supervisors in Africa.

Through the R3Lab, regulators and supervisors in Africa will strengthen their methodologies and develop solutions necessary to create an enabling regulatory environment. R3Lab will assist in solving identified gaps hence building a strong and effective regulatory and supervisory entity. The platform will be highly interactive and practical as it will encourage discussions, foster debate, and effectively transfer knowledge between supervisors.

The project objectives are:

• To increase supervisors and regulators knowledge and skills on implementing sound, proportionate and fit for purpose practices across the region.
• To support actions and initiatives and build on supervisors’ technical capacity to promote innovation and sustainable change.
• To foster networking with peers and more senior supervisors to identify and resolve supervisory issues faced in their ongoing work and address emerging regulatory issues.
• Build a multinational team of experienced leaders in regulatory and supervisory matters.

SADC Green Bonds Programme

This project aims to accelerate the take-up of green bonds as a tool for SADC member countries to tap into domestic and international capital markets to finance green projects and assets.

The project will:

• Support the development of listing guidelines and regulations for green bonds.
• Support a pipeline of potential issuers
• Engage the institutional investment community to promote green bond issuance.
• Undertake training/capacity building of various stakeholders on climate finance.
• Support the adoption and/or enhancement of climate-related financial reporting/disclosures.

SEC Nigeria Digital Transformation Programme

The Programme aims to support the modernisation and transformation of the ICT systems and architecture at the Nigeria Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The Programme will enhance the SEC’s ability to deliver on its mandate, improve efficiency and enable the regulator to support innovation in an increasingly digital market. A robust ICT/Digital infrastructure will improve the regulator’s agility in response to paradigm shifts that may necessitate digital approaches/tools or remote working.

Strengthening Climate Resilience and Adaptation through Financial Services: Research for CGAP’s Climate Resilience Project

CGAP’s Climate resilience project aims to offer guidance to financial inclusion stakeholders on the role that financial services can play in helping the vulnerable to reduce the impact of and adapt to specific climate risks.

FSD Africa is supporting the co-creation and testing of a conceptual framework and research methodology for describing, understanding, and researching the nexus between climate and financial inclusion. This framework and methodology is being rolled out in Nigeria and Bangladesh, with the research findings to be shared with national stakeholders in both countries and the global financial inclusion community.

Supervision of ESG-related Risks in the Insurance Sector

The overall objective of the project is to assess industry preparedness in addressing climate and environmental risks, capacity building and formulation of policies or regulations that address ESG risks. This will enhance transparency and maintenance of an appropriate approach to disclosure of ESG risks.  The project is divided into three phases, where the first phase will focus on industry ESG assessment to determine the quantitative and qualitative industry exposure to physical, transition and liability risks.The second phase will focus on Capacity building of the industry stakeholders to will help the industry players and supervisors gain exposure on best practices in other jurisdictions. The last phase will then focus on development of policies/regulations that addresses the ESG risks.

Technical Support for the WAEMU Electronic Trading Platform (ETP)

As part of the FSD Africa strategy to support the design and improvement of market infrastructure, we are supporting the set-up of a new over-the-counter market to serve the eight countries of the WAEMU region.

FSD Africa, in collaboration with UMOA-Titres (UT), has appointed a technical expert to assist in implementing an Electronic Trading Platform (ETP) for the WAEMU region. The ETP will improve flexibility and efficiency and broaden the investor base on the secondary trading market for debt securities.