We do see increased interest in cross border investments from within our region, particularly in the financial sector. With respect to the need to mobilize domestic savings, Africa certainly needs to expand the reach of the financial sector and to make the financial sector more efficient. In Zambia, the majority of the population does not have access to financial products. The Bank of Zambia has therefore made advancing financial inclusion as one of its strategic objectives. Zambia has a very low population density and there are many areas that are currently not served by any financial institution. Reaching these areas will require the application of technology and the concept of branchless banking. To facilitate such innovation, a robust regulatory regime governing the payment system has been implemented with the enactment of the National Payment Systems Act in 2007. In this regard, Zambia is learning a lot from the advances made in countries such as Uganda and Kenya, where cell phone technology has expanded the reach of financial services and products. On its part the Zambian Government is also taking concrete steps to enhance the application of Information and Communication Technology across the broad spread of Government services and the private sector. How can we build better and more resilient institutions that boost confidence in the benefits of a market economy and can act as strong anchors of inflation expectations?
Zambia has also benefitted from increased support from bi-lateral donors, with the prospect of additional resources being made available in the current calendar year from the European Union amounting to around 13% of all the grants that were scheduled to be received in 2009 from the EU and individual donors. Institutions such as the African Development Bank have also made changes to their procedures aimed at fast tracking the disbursement of critical development finance resources, against already approved projects. However, there are serious concerns that Africa has been disadvantaged in the allocation of resources made available by the international community – particularly to key institutions such as the AfDB. There is also concern that whilst the principle of increased resource flows through Institutions such as the IMF should be targeted beyond the traditional BoP needs has generally been accepted at a political level, there is some reluctance at the institutional level for institutions such as the IMF to venture outside of their traditional confines of their support. In Zambia, the Government has engaged our cooperating partners to ensure that the additional resource provided to help African countries deal with the global crisis can be utilized to do just that – and not be simply kept for a rainy day that ignores the current  4  BIS Review 128/2009  monsoon. In my own personal interaction with the IMF, I believe that in Zambia we do have a good common understanding on this issue.