Saudi Arabia Crown Prince investing $1bn this year to help African countries recover from COVID-19 | THE DAILY TRIBUNE | KINGDOM OF BAHRAIN

Saudi Arabia Crown Prince investing $1bn this year to help African countries recover from COVID-19 | THE DAILY TRIBUNE | KINGDOM OF BAHRAIN

Saudi Arabia will support African countries with investments and loans worth about $1 billion this year to help their economies recover from the COVID-19 pandemic Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman said on Tuesday. The projects will be carried out by the Saudi Fund for Development (SFD), Prince Mohammed said in a six-minute televised speech to a debt relief conference in Paris. “Saudi Arabia is one of the countries that supports COVAX and the Kingdom is one of the countries that supports exporting vaccines to developing countries,” he said, in reference to a worldwide initiative aimed at equitable access to COVID-19 jabs. Last year’s Saudi-hosted G20 Summit launched initiatives to support the African economy while the SFD offered loans to African countries. He also said the Kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), had invested around $4 billion in the energy, mining, telecoms, food and other sectors in Africa and that it would continue to look for opportunities in other sectors in the continent. Prince Mohammed said his country has paid $122 million to combat terror along the African coast. “We are aiming that this summit concludes with solutions to the debts of African countries,” the crown prince said.