By Charles Mangwiro

MAPUTO, July 31 (Reuters) - African governments, especially those rich in natural resources, should do more to battle corruption and strengthen financial governance, the International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday.

In an interview with Reuters in Maputo, the director of the IMF's African department said that the world's poorest continent needed to continue the progress it had made to make its governments more transparent and less prone to graft.

"Ultimately the effective use of aid will require that African countries strengthen their financial governance system and reduce corruption, particularly in natural resource-rich countries," Abdoulaye Bio-Tchane, the IMF's director of African department, said.

The Fund has predicted that sub-Saharan Africa's economy will grow by 6.7 percent this year, the fastest rate in a decade, thanks not only to high commodities prices but also to prudent policies.

Bio-Tchane said on Tuesday that growth for Africa as a whole would be 7 percent in 2007.

The forecast for sub-Saharan Africa is still below the threshold needed to attain the U.N. Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving extreme poverty by 2015, according to the Fund's estimates.

Widespread corruption is widely seen as one of the barriers to expanding trade and foreign investment in Africa. It also remains a big concern for international donors, including the IMF.

Bio-Tchane said the Fund was monitoring how individual African governments were handling foreign aid, adding that a greater amount of assistance was needed to help low-income nations achieve the MDG objectives.

The world's richest nations have been accused of failing to double development aid to Africa, as promised at the 2005 Group of Eight summit at Gleneagles, Scotland. "Donors should live up to their pledges to Africa," Bio-Tchane said.

G8 leaders pledged $60 billion to fight AIDS and other diseases in Africa last month at a summit at Heiligendamm, Germany.