António Henriques da Silva was speaking on the sidelines of the event "The Angolan Development Roundtable", promoted by The Business Year and highlighted the improvement in the business environment in recent years, especially since 2018, when the new private investment law was approved.
"At that time, we only had registered investment projects from seven countries. Five years later, there are now 51, and only then did we see an increase in interest in investing in Angola", said the president of the Private Investment and Export Promotion Agency (Aipex ).
According to the same official, at the end of 2018, Angola registered 70 private investment projects, a number that more than doubled in the following year to 168.
The "critical period" of covid-19 followed, with 106 intentions in 2020, and another 100 in 2021.
By October this year, Angola had registered 91 projects "and the year is not over yet", stated the president of Aipex with optimism.
"It means that we are beginning to feel that the crisis caused by the pandemic is emerging and that there is consistency in the improvements that have been introduced and in the confidence that must be transmitted to investors", he stressed.
A result that is also due to the economic diplomacy actions carried out by the President, which helped to improve the country's image in terms of the business environment and practices of corruption, nepotism and bureaucracy, he considered.
"We think it will continue and now we need to gain scale. If the sum of the projects takes us until October this year to 535 investment projects for a total of almost 2.8 billion dollars, we still have a lot of room for progression and we think we should continue with consistency in our actions," he continued.
The objective is the implementation of projects "that can help reduce regional asymmetries", he underlined, adding that the areas of investment are diversified and include agriculture and fisheries, services and industry, which represents 217 projects, around 40 percent of total.
