Senegal's President Macky Sall, the current chair of the African Union (AU), has called for the creation of a pan-African financial rating agency, saying international agencies exaggerate the risk of investing in Africa, increasing the cost of financing.

In a speech at the "Dakar 2022 Economic Conference", held this Saturday, but broadcasted this Sunday by the local private radio RFM, and quoted by Lusa, Macky Sal defended the "need, in the face of the injustice of sometimes very arbitrary classifications, to have a pan-African rating agency".

"By 2020, while all economies were suffering the effects of Covid-19, 18 of the 32 African countries rated by at least one of the major rating agencies saw their ratings revised downward. This represents 56% of downwardly revised ratings for African countries compared to an average global rate of 31% over that period," he said.

The current AU president argued that there are studies indicating that at least 20% of the ranking criteria for African countries are based on cultural or linguistic factors that are "rather subjective" or "unrelated to the parameters" that measure the stability of an economy.

For Macky Sal, one of the consequences is that "the perceived risk of investing in Africa is always higher than the real risk. So we find ourselves paying more insurance premiums than necessary, which increases the cost of credit to our country.

"We continue to pay very high interest rates due to an unfair system of risk assessment for investment in Africa," he stressed.