Afriland First Bank launches Islamic window

Cameroon's Afriland First Bank, the country's largest financial group, has launched the Central African state's first Islamic window as the availability of sharia-compliant financial products expands across the continent.

African markets are gradually opening to Islamic finance, buoyed by governments' debut sales of sovereign Islamic bonds and legislative efforts to make the sector more attractive for companies across the region.

Afriland, which has offered an Islamic deposit account since 2000 to help Muslims perform their pilgrimage to Mecca, will offer a range of common types of Islamic financing contracts, the lender said in a statement on its website.

These include murabaha, musharaka, mudaraba and ijara, contracts which follow religious principles including a ban on interest and pure monetary speculation.

The lender developed the Islamic window with assistance from the Islamic Corporation for the Development of the Private Sector (ICD), a unit of the Jeddah-based Islamic Development Bank.

Afriland, founded in 1987, now operates subsidiaries in Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome and Principe, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Zambia, South Sudan, and Guinea.

Approximately a fifth of Cameroon's 22 million people are Muslim, while neighbouring Nigeria has about 80 million Muslims, sub-Saharan Africa's largest Muslim population.