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Addressing Hard Currency Liquidity Challenges: Is Trade Finance Up to the Task?
When: May 21, 2024
Location: GTR East Africa 2024, Nairobi
People: Simon Cook

Partner Simon Cook moderated a panel discussion titled "Addressing Hard Currency Liquidity Challenges: Is Trade Finance Up to the Task?" at Global Trade Review's (GTR) East Africa 2024 event: Promoting sustainable economic growth through trade, which was held in Nairobi, Kenya on May 21 and 22.

Dollar shortages continue to drag on East Africa’s financial sector; even those markets that have fared recent crises well such as Tanzania have experienced constricted supply in recent months. MSMEs continue to feel the effects most acutely, with anticipated increase of regulatory fees on banks and microfinance institutions across Kenya set to compound the disadvantages African trade finance already faces due to global financial regulation. What can be done to ensure critical liquidity continues to flow into local banking and corporate sectors, and is trade finance up to the task?

The panel for this session looked at the root causes of these shortages across the region, and how these feed into trade financing challenges faced at industry and company level. Issues debated included:

  • The need for – and challenges to – international bank and development finance support for local financiers and corporates, and how both local and international players can best adapt to a hardened trade finance environment.
  • Do foreign risk off-takers’ and lenders’ expectations fail to take the realities of African trade sufficiently into account, and to what extent is their ability to do so constrained?
  • Which practical steps can local institutions and companies take to maximise the trade finance liquidity available to them?