(Ecofin Agency) - Moroccan lender Attijariwafa Bank will help Cote d’Ivoire establish two investment funds which aim to finance its tourism sector. This was revealed by Ivoirian minister of tourism, Siandou Fofana, during a meeting of the Club Afrique Development held on April 20, 2017.

The first of the two funds is a "private investment fund dedicated to tourism and hospitality". According to M. Fofana, the fund will focus on boosting financing in toursim industry while bringing together private actors who share a common interest in the funding of key tourism projects with high profitability rates.

The second fund for its part is a sovereign fund also dedicated to tourism’s financing. It will, according to the minister of tourism, gather sovereign capitals from “allied countries” and be supported by the Ivoirian government itself. It will help direct institutional savings toward tourism in Cote d’Ivoire. "The fund should also help attract, pilot and promote foreign investments, aiming mainly to develop regional and seaside tourisms, but ecotourism as well," he said.

The two funds should capture over the next four years 3 trillion CFA (about $4.9 billion). They are to be established by the investment arm of Attjariwafa Bank.

For some years now, tourism in Ivory Coast has been experiencing quite a boom. Indeed, in 2016, the sector generated CFA1,543.9 billion (about $2.5 billion) against CFA836 billion in 2015. Tourism thus contributed to 7.5% of GDP last year, as compared to 4.8% in 2015.

In order to stay on this course, the government plans, under its development strategy for tourism, to increase the number of visiting tourists from 1.5 million in 2016, to 5 million by 2020.

In the same framework, it also intends to boost hotels capacities in the Abidjan region, knowingly from 3,500 rooms at present to 7,000 rooms by 2020. In the inner-country, the authorities target 4,000 rooms by 2020, from 1,500 at the moment. All these aiming to make the nation a tourism hub.

B.K