ASINT / Finance & Institutions
More than 4,000 delegates gathered at the Kintele Conference Centre in Brazzaville from 25 to 29 May for the 61st Annual Meetings of the African Development Bank Group. The theme chosen was direct: mobilising Africa’s development financing at scale in a fragmented world. Behind that framing lies a problem the meetings were designed to address head-on. Africa holds nearly $4 trillion in managed savings, while facing an estimated annual development financing gap of $400 billion. The shortfall is not a resource problem. It is an architecture problem. The capital exists. It is not moving where it needs to go.
That is the premise on which President Sidi Ould Tah, the former Mauritanian finance minister who took office as the AfDB’s ninth president in September 2025, has built the New African Financial Architecture for Development, known as NAFAD. NAFAD proposes a systemic framework aimed at reorganising how capital and risk are deployed across the African financial ecosystem, structured around three pillars: system architecture, capital mobilisation, and capital deployment. The framework is not new, but its operationalisation accelerated significantly ahead of Brazzaville. NAFAD was adopted by the African financial ecosystem on 9 April through the “Abidjan Consensus,” and had received earlier endorsement from African leaders at the African Union Summit in February in Addis Ababa.
In Brazzaville, the question was no longer whether NAFAD was relevant. It was what it would concretely produce. The first identified deliverable is the recapitalisation of ATIDI, the continent’s trade and investment insurance agency. The AfDB’s $125 million investment into ATIDI forms part of the NAFAD initiative and will make the Bank its largest shareholder, taking its stake from 3% to 14%. The stated target is to scale ATIDI’s annual coverage from $3 billion to $10 billion. The logic is straightforward: without a guarantee mechanism operating at scale, private capital does not enter. The ATIDI recapitalisation is the de-risking lever NAFAD is prioritising first.
On 29 May, the final day of the meetings, the “Brazzaville Appeal” was adopted, marking the formal commitment of civil society, philanthropic organisations, and the African diaspora to NAFAD. The signal is political as much as institutional. It extends the coalition of support beyond governments and financial institutions toward actors whose flows are often informal and difficult to channel. The question the appeal leaves open is precisely that one: how will the commitments from civil society and the diaspora translate into mobilisable instruments and directable capital?
The Board of Governors concluded the meetings by formally endorsing President Ould Tah’s mandate and calling on him to accelerate the reform of Africa’s financial architecture, while also expressing support for institutional reforms designed to make the Bank more agile and closer to beneficiaries. The Bank leaves Brazzaville with a reinforced mandate, a broader coalition, and one concrete operational deliverable. What remains to be measured is the distance between the ambition and the execution.