State Minister briefs WEF’s participants on Ethiopia’s SDGs financing roadmap

Addis Ababa, January 23, 2020 (FBC) –As a core element of the country’s first-ever 10-year perspective Development Plan, Ethiopia has developed an integrated SDGs financing roadmap and monitoring plan.

The remark was made by Dr Eyob Tekalign, Ethiopia’s State Minister of Finance, at 50th World Economic Forum (WEF) taking place in Davos, Switzerland.

The State Minister, who was a contributor to the session under the title “Financing Roadmaps for Sustainable Development” said the plan was developed after conducting a country-wide needs assessment to identify over 110 key interventions necessary to meet SDG targets in Ethiopia.

The State Minister elaborated the financing roadmap for financing sustainable development aligns all financing flows and policies of the country with economic, social and environmental priorities.

In this regard, Dr Eyob said “this financial roadmap supports aligning economic policies and financial systems with the 2030 Agenda.”

He said the roadmap focuses on mobilizing all sources of finance – domestic and international as well as public and private.

The plan, which has as its integral part Home Grown Economic Reform Agenda, takes into account the need to sustain rapid economic growth taking place in the country while addressing challenges on the macro-economy including forex management, inflation, and debt sustainability.

Furthermore, he emphasized on the need to rebalance our source of growth from the public to private, the Ethiopian Government has taken concert steps to revise and enact laws, regulations, and procedures to attract and encourage a pipeline of bankable SDG investment and working to address impediments to private investment in the SDGs at scale.

In this aspect, he said, the concert measures taken by the Ethiopian Government to put in place a robust Public Private Partnership (PPP) legal framework, identifying a list of infrastructure projects to be implemented through PPPs and placed a strong institutional structure.

According to the State Minister, these measures are producing concert results such as recently entered into PPP agreement for the first solar project, with a capacity of 250MW, which is enabling the country to receive the lowest tariff for energy in Africa -2.526 US cents/KWh.

The roadmap also paves the way to seize the utilization of the potential of financial innovations, new technologies, and digitalization to provide equitable access to finance.