Tunisia is hosting the first African Financial Markets Initiative (AFMI) conference on “Building sustainable local currency bond markets for the future”.
The Conference(October 22-24) has brought together policy makers and market participants to share experience on and contribute to critical issues facing the development of local currency bond markets in the continent.
The audience includes representation from African central banks, government ministries, institutional investors, investment bankers, financial and legal advisors, credit rating agencies and other stakeholders, including high level speakers.
The discussions are covering major topics including: Development of primary and secondary markets, and the impact and importance of liquidity; Expansion and diversification of the investor base; enhancing infrastructure for securities settlement and payment systems; strengthening the taxation and accounting systems as well as the legal and regulatory framework.
Ideas, solutions and best practices will be presented and discussed extensively on how to assess the importance of sovereign credit ratings for issuers; improving bond market data, data collection and dissemination, which are prerequisites for the creation of bond indices.
The role of infrastructure bonds in the development of local currency bond markets will also be heard. Opportunities for side meetings and networking will also be available.
As part of the African Development Bank’s strategy to strengthen the financial sector in African economies, it has launched the “African Financial Market Initiative” (AFMI) which is targeted to further the development of domestic African capital markets.
The objectives of the AFMI are to contribute to the development of local currency debt markets in Africa; to reduce African countries dependency on foreign currency denominated debt; to help enlarge the investor base in African domestic debt markets and to improve availability and transparency of African fixed income markets related data, among others.
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