World Report

Amadeu de Jesús Castelhano Mauricio,
Governor of the Banco Nacional de Angola (BNA)

madeu de Jesús Castelhano Mauricio, Governor of the Banco Nacional de Angola (BNA), Angola’s central bank, speaks about the country’s macroeconomic reform, and the positive conditions it has created for the growth of Angola’s private sector.

What role is Angola’s financial sector playing in the country’s reconstruction process? And how is BNA working to improve micro-credit financing for small- and medium-sized enterprises?

It is obvious that we must now have a policy directed towards development. The war has been over for more than two years now and there are no longer any reasonable arguments in favour of policies that are not development oriented. In the first couple of years we had to carry out economic reforms in order to move towards economic stabilisation, and we feel that this has now been achieved to a certain degree. Only since this happened have we been able to think about financing progressive policy instruments, or even the establishment of a public fund for development purposes. At present we are making plans and will establish instruments to provide accessible credit to the population in the near future. It really hasn’t been possible before now, especially with our previous inflation rates of over 100 percent, which would have meant that rates of return on investments would have had to exceed 100 percent, and of course, that is not too common at the outset of a new business.

What is inflation running at now?

We got it down to 76 percent by 2003, and for 2004 the average has been about 34 percent. The rate planned for in the 2005 budget is 15 percent. Interest rates will almost certainly go down as well, reflecting this tendency of the inflation rate to decrease. When this happens, credit mechanisms will be made possible because the financial institutions will adapt to the changing situation.

Are all the necessary regulatory mechanisms in place for when this comes about?

At the institutional level there is a new law that regulates the activities of financial institutions. With this law we established a set of rules to facilitate the creation of what we consider to be the pillars of a healthy scenario, for example the starting up of investment funds and ways of organising credit. There is a set of complementary measures to this law that make the establishment of micro-credit funds compulsory for all financial institutions. This is a clear sign of the government’s intention to create favourable conditions for the development of small businesses, and especially for those involved in production.