Portuguese Foreign Affairs Minister João Gomes Cravinho has affirmed his country’s continuing support for the African Development Bank (www.AfDB.org) during a meeting at the Bank’s headquarters in Abidjan. Portugal has been a non-regional member of the Bank since 1983.
Cravinho met with African Development Bank Group Senior Vice President Swazi Tshabalala and members of the finance, and resource mobilisation departments on Tuesday 4 July. The parties discussed their mutual relationship and the Lusophone Compact (https://apo-opa.info/3PGw0d2) agreement signed between the African Development Bank, the government of Portugal and six Portuguese speaking African countries—Angola, Cabo Verde, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Principe—in November 2018.
The minister also expressed interest in the increased use of Portuguese as a language within the Bank. The Bank has five Portuguese speaking African countries as members and Portuguese is increasingly a language of business, he said.
Cravinho said Portugal, which has viewed the African continent as extremely important to its foreign policy agenda, was keenly interested in the Bank’s assessment of the Lusophone Compact thus far. He said the Compact, developed to create a new mechanism of benefit to all the countries, could have an even greater reach.
“Our sense is that it’s insufficiently known and probably insufficiently used,” Cravinho said, adding that Portugal stood ready to assist countries in maximizing the benefits of the agreement.
The minister said Portugal was also keen to expand its ties with non-Lusophone countries such as Senegal, South Africa and Côte d’Ivoire, and to possibly extend the Lusophone Compact to those countries and beyond.
