AfDB to support economic diversification in Djibouti

10 Mar 2016, 12:00 am
Chibuike Oguh

Summary

The new Country Strategy Paper for Djibouti focuses on developing infrastructure in the energy and health sectors and supporting good governance.

African Development Bank headquarter, Abidjan, Ivory Coast

The African Development Bank has approved a $36 million support package for Djibouti to help the East African country diversify its economy, improve governance, and curb high unemployment.

In a statement released on Wednesday, AfDB said its Board of Directors approved the support package as part of commitments contained in the bank’s 2016-2020 Country Strategy Paper (CSP) for Djibouti.

The new CSP, which succeeds the previous 2011-2015 CSP, focuses on two strategic pillars. The first pillar aims to develop socio-economic infrastructure in the energy and health sectors while the second pillar aims to support good governance through institutional capacity building.

Under the first pillar, the CSP will finance an electrification support project as well as a referral hospital construction project while the second pillar of the CSP will finance a new institutional capacity-building project in the public and private sectors.

“The CSP combines innovation and continuity, and will differ from previous CSPs in that it focuses more closely on advisory and institutional capacity-building actions, scales up the local job content in project design, and its formulation is based on a series of analytical briefs that will help to inform advisory activities and support Bank and Government investments,” according to papers presented to the AfDB’s Board of Directors in Abidjan on Wednesday.

Located on the Horn of Africa, Djibouti is highly dependent on services relating to its strategic location as a deepwater transit port in the Red Sea. With a population of about 920,000 people, Djibouti’s GDP (at purchasing power parity) stood at $2.51 billion in 2013.

Djibouti suffers from high unemployment rate of over 40 percent with about three-quarters of the country’s population living in the capital city. At the end of 2015, the AfDB’s portfolio in Djibouti comprised 12 operations, amounting to $149 million.
 


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