MAPUTO -- A senior official of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Monday spoke highly of the resilience of sub-Saharan African economies and predicted that the region's growth to reach 5.4 percent in 2013.

David Lipton, a deputy managing director of the IMF, said during a visit to Maputo, capital of Mozambique, that sub-Saharan Africa has been "remarkably resilient" in the face of the global economic crisis.

The region's growth was robust at 5.1 percent in 2012, and is expected to rise to 5.4 percent in 2013 and 5.7 percent in 2014, Lipton said, citing the IMF estimates. The compared to the estimate of the global economy's sluggish growth of 3.3 percent this year and 4 percent next year, he added.

Lipton particularly commended Mozambique, saying that it has managed to offset weak demand from the euro zone with growing links to the emerging market economies. Mozambique registered an impressive 7.4 percent economic growth in 2012.

The once civil-war-torn country has in recent years emerged as an important player in the global energy market. European and American energy giants are already exploring natural gas in Mozambique's rich off-shore gas fields while its northern Tete province sits on one of the world's largest untapped coal deposits.

However, Lipton lamented that Mozambique is still one of the world's poorest countries with many social indicators, such as access to clean water, below the average for Sub Saharan Africa. Half of the population lives below the national poverty line, with two thirds living off subsistence agriculture.

"Mozambique, like many other countries in Africa, still faces formidable challenges. But it has made great progress and can build on this. Africa is in a different place than it was twenty years ago, and nowhere is this more true than in Mozambique," the Mozambique news agency AIM quoted him as saying.