The Monetary Policy Committee of Central Bank of the Gambia today projected a five year growth on the country’s economic medium term outlook, but called for “continued reform and human capital development”.

Speaking today at a news conference in Banjul the governor of Central Bank of the Gambia Bakary Jammeh said “what is critical to know is that for the next five years the medium term outlook for the economy will remain very robust and very good.

“The medium term outlook for The Gambia is good. The growth projections are extremely good. What we need to maintain is to stay focus and continue doing the reforms in order to ensure that growth is inclusive, and we also need to work on the human capital development.”

He added: “this economy is going to continue to grow robustly that is very important and at the moment we are doing assessment on 2019 but I am sure it is going to grow robustly in 2019, and in 2020 also we expect the economy to grow very robustly.”

He said the main challenge of the economy is agriculture and tourism “but that doesn’t cause serious alarm anymore” adding “even in 2019 agriculture was shocked and the worse case scenario we are looking at is that no tourist will come at all through the Thomas Cook case. (And) yet still the economy grows around 4 percent even with that pessimist scenario. We know that scenario is not the right scenario.”

The Monetary Policy Committee, comprising of all commercial banks in the country but headed by the Central Bank’s governor, released its economic assessment report for the last quarter of 2019.

The quarterly reports give a detailed analysis of the country’s economic activity and outlook. The next quarterly report is expected next February.

Reporting by Adama Makasuba