Invited this week at the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, Togolese President Faure Gnassingbé pleaded for cross-ownership between the New Development Bank (NBD) and the ECOWAS Investment and Development Bank (EBID). .
It was during a brief address on Friday, July 27 that the current President of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) made his appeal. In his speech, Faure Gnassingbé invited the member countries of the two organizations “to come together to study the possibilities of cooperation and partnership”.
In this perspective, he continued, “a win-win partnership with the new BRICS development bank in 2016 could be forged with the ECOWAS Investment and Development Bank (EBID)”.
For him, it is about “two financial arms at the service of development that could be closer perhaps by a cross ownership in the pyramid structures of each of the two institutions”.
The Togolese did not fail to congratulate the countries of the bloc “for what they managed to accomplish in ten years”. To date, he believes, the BRICS “is an alternative global leadership.”
Headquartered in Shanghai, China, the NDB, the BRICS development bank, is by its DNA an alternative to the Brettons Wood institutions. An initiative born out of discontent with the major emerging markets and their lack of representation at the World Bank and the IMF, the institution aims to mobilize resources for infrastructure and sustainable development projects in member countries and elsewhere.
And already, the African States, weary of the sometimes cumbersome conditions of the traditional donors, whet their appetite.
