Africa is not immune to the world's financial troubles, the head of the African Development Bank today, asking that at the upcoming G20 international economic conference the continent not be forgotten, according to dpa. "For us, in the low income countries, the crisis is reaching us and hitting very hard," Donald Kaberuka, the bank's president, said. The continent was witnessing contractions in all major sectors "much faster than we thought." "We fear that the achievements of the last 10 years will be wiped off," he added, noting that Africa had experienced a sustained period of growth until last year. Speaking with journalists in Geneva, Kaberuka gave the example of Ghana which was working itself off aid dependency and issued bonds on the capital markets for the first time in 2008. Since the markets declined and credit dried up, other countries, like Zambia and Tanzania, find that they cannot follow suit and sell their debt. Kaberuka said that for Africa a severe economic decline would mean more than job losses and home foreclosures.
