The director of the African department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said Monday that the continent faces a "dangerous divergence" compared to the rest of the world in terms of vaccines and economic growth as a result of the pandemic.

"The recovery is more anemic than we would like, we have 6% growth in the world, and in sub-Saharan Africa it is 3.4% this year, we wanted it to be the other way around because this is a dangerous divergence," Abebe Aemro Selassie said during the Peace Summit, which is taking place on the eve of the summit on financing African economies, both in Paris.

In remarks made from Paris, Selassie pointed out that "the average growth was 5 or 6% in recent years, so a contraction of about 2% is really severe, and it's an average, which means that in some countries, like the archipelagos dependent on tourism, there was a double-digit recession," as was the case in the Seychelles or Cape Verde.

Asked what the IMF is doing to help these countries, Selassie said the first step is to secure more fiscal space, obtained through various instruments, including the issuance of the $650 billion Special Drawing Rights (SDR).

"What we are doing is continuing to support countries to have more fiscal space, not only through loans, but also through the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust [PRGT], but most vital of all is to have a global distribution of vaccines, all over the world," he said.

The African continent, despite being home to 14% of the world's population, has vaccinated only 1.5% so far, due to difficulties in purchasing vaccines, and also because of the logistical challenges of vaccine administration.

In the conversation that also included other speakers, such as academics and activists, the head of the African department of the IMF explained that Africa is expected to receive about $33 billion from SDRs taking into account the quotas of each member state, but pointed out that this figure could be higher if the countries least in need of these funds agree to channel the budget boost to the countries most in need.

"The injection of reserves they will receive can be used to buy vaccines that they then import, or investment goods that are then used domestically, but it will certainly be easier for governments to have the resources to buy those goods," he replied, when asked how citizens will benefit from this allocation of capital.

On distribution, Selassie said that "there are several proposals on how can countries with sufficient liquidity make some of the SDRs available, one being to strengthen the PRGT, an approach that has already been used, and that is a fund financed by the countries, which lend the SDRs to the IMF, which then lends them at zero cost to the countries" that need them most.