The largest development organisation in the Muslim world, the Islamic Development Bank, is set to ramp up its fundraising activities and form a partnership with the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to address a yawning infrastructure gap in African and other developing countries, Financial Times reports.
The plan to join forces with the AIIB to co-lend to projects in the Islamic world would boost the international footprint of the China-led development bank that was launched in spite of US opposition in 2015.
“We will partner with the AIIB,” Bandar Hajjar, IDB president, said in an interview with the Financial Times. “We will co-finance many projects [with AIIB] in the future in Africa. Africa needs . . . about $150bn a year to finance infrastructure and there are about 650m people in Africa without access to electricity.”
Co-operation between the AIIB and the IDB, which are capitalised at $100bn and $150bn respectively, is set to create a new force in development finance for a swath of developing countries. Many of the IDB’s 57 member countries overlap with the AIIB’s approved membership of some 80 nations.