African leaders on Tuesday pushed for easier access to credit to help fund major investments and boost economic growth at a summit with French President Emmanuel Macron.

A years-long campaign by African governments to reform their borrowing costs received a boost on Monday at the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi.

Mr Macron said he supported creating a first-loss guarantee mechanism to de-risk investments on the continent and would lobby for the idea at the G7 summit next month.

African governments argue they suffer from an unduly high perception of risk among lenders, which can make credit prohibitively expensive.

“The issue is not liquidity. It is risk architecture,” Kenyan President William Ruto said in remarks at the summit.

At Mr Macron’s invitation, Mr Ruto will attend the G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains, France, and hopes to build momentum this week for proposals he can take there.

More than 30 African government leaders, as well as heads of multilateral financial institutions and business executives from across Africa and France, are attending the Nairobi summit, the first France has held in an English-speaking country.

France aims to use the event, which Mr Macron said had mobilised €23 billion ($27.01 billion) in investments in Africa, to develop new partnerships in Africa after seeing its influence fade in former West African colonies.

UN secretary-general António Guterres noted that African countries face borrowing costs that are, on average, twice as high as those of advanced industrialised economies.

“That is not a market verdict on Africa. It is a verdict on the injustices of the system,” he told the summit.

Decrying what they say are biases against them that overstate the continent’s risk, African governments have called for changes to the methodologies used by credit ratings agencies.

Major agencies, including S&P Global Ratings, Moody’s, and Fitch, reject accusations of regional bias, stating their ratings are based on globally applied, publicly disclosed criteria.

Mr Macron’s proposal of a first-loss guarantee mechanism would help boost capital flows into Africa.

It is part of a broader push to mobilise private capital for African nations as rich governments cut back on development financing in favour of defence and other domestic priorities.

While other G7 nations have voiced support for making global financial institutions more responsive to African needs, the level of support for specific proposals is unclear.

(Reuters/NAN)