Finance Ministers from seven African countries participating in the G20 Compact with Africa (CWA or the Compact) initiative will meet as a group for the first time in Accra, Ghana on Wednesday 6 September at Mövenpick Ambassador Hotel.

The CWA is a G20 partnership programme to support the African Union Agenda 2063. The programme engages African countries in building a reliable financial and macroeconomic framework in order to expand investment opportunities, create employment and push for more sustainable infrastructure on the continent.

Following the G20 Africa Partnership Conference held in Berlin from 12-13 June 2017 and the G20 Summit in Hamburg of 7-8 July 2017, the G20 Compact with Africa was launched. Initially seven countries (Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Ethiopia, Morocco, Rwanda, Senegal and Tunisia) have agreed to participate in the CWA and additional countries will likely join.

The CWA seeks to support African Compact countries to improve their macroeconomic, business, and financial frameworks for attracting private investment and to strengthen their public sector financial and debt management; and to encourage private investment from G20 countries. The CWA is central to the economic transformation agenda related to these three pillars.

The Ministers of Finance of the CWA countries will meet on 6 September 2017 in Accra. The objective of this meeting is to express commitment and support for the Compact agenda; to provide a stocktaking of progress to date; and to outline next steps, including a peer learning framework to address common challenges over the next three years.

It will be important to ensure the Compact with Africa translates into action on the ground and boosts private sector investment in each CWA member country. This meeting will address the critical role that the Compact can play in the collective economic transformation agendas of Africa and how to overcome some of the challenges in its implementation. Challenges exist in each of the three pillars of the Compact, whether in terms of the need to improve the business environment through standardization and improved incentives or the need to, improve domestic resource mobilization and public investments through investment friendly tax regimes and the allocation of public investment toward transformational goals; or the need to enhance financing through the creation of robust debt markets or the access to de-risking instruments.

This meeting is an opportunity for Ministers of Finance to discuss how to leverage the Compact, ensure that a platform is in place to support it, and make it sustainable with enhanced private sector investment.

Ghana’s Ministry of Finance (MoF) is organising this event as the first peer-to-peer convening, with technical support from the African Center for Economic Transformation (ACET).

Ghana’s Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, said, “We are determined to put Ghana beyond aid, and this compact squarely fits into our broader agenda of increasing private sector investment to drive economic development on our continent.”

He added, “I look forward to welcoming my colleague Finance Ministers to this meeting, which presents us with the opportunity to make clear decisions on how to sustain a peer learning platform to deepen and sustain the CWA initiative.”

The seven Compact countries will participate in the meeting. Other observer countries expected to attend are Burkina Faso, Benin, Gambia, Guinea, Liberia and Togo.

Representatives of the African Development Bank, the World Bank and the IMF will share perspectives on the three Compact frameworks – macroeconomic, business and financial – and the roles they will play to support countries in implementation.

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Download the Agenda: Compact with Africa Finance Ministers Meeting (PDF)