How to reform Africa’s top development bank

Next month, the board of governors of the African Development Bank (AfDB) will select a new president. That person will be starting in times fraught with significant challenges as the very basis of international development is being challenged.

I seriously considered running for president of AfDB five years ago. While I was prepared to lead if elected, I knew my chances were slim: Akinwumi Adesina, the current president, is an Anglophone West African like me and continental institutions follow an unwritten, regional rotation rule. My true goal for running was to provoke a necessary debate about the Bank’s priorities. I opted out for personal reasons — but here is what I would have done had I led the AfDB.

My mantra would be to end the bank’s everything-everywhere-all-at-once approach. Like many African governments, the AfDB has limited resources and too many priorities. In trying to be everything to everyone, it’s become a mini World Bank but it really shouldn’t be.

I would focus on three core primary concerns: Grow the Bank’s investable capital; link infrastructure development to value addition; and expand Africa’s skilled labor force.

My first target would be to match the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in annual capital deployment by the end of my second five-year term. Though Africa’s population is more than twice that of Latin America and the Caribbean, the AfDB’s 2023 approvals were only $6.1 billion — less than half the IDB’s $16 billion. To close this gap, I’d scale up co-financing with regional banks like Afreximbank, Africa50, and the Africa Finance Corporation. Drawing inspiration from Arab development banks, we’d pool capital for joint projects, enhancing reach and efficiency.

I’d also establish an “accelerator hub” to identify and prepare bankable projects, making them accessible for co-financing with European, Chinese, and other multilateral and national partners. Even before the Bank’s own resources match the IDB, we would push to match these partners in total financing deployed.

The next task would be to invest in infrastructure that enables value addition, prioritizing regional transport and energy projects — key enablers of trade and industrialization. These sectors unlock productivity and integration and form the backbone of a competitive continental economy.

Our aim would be to reduce industrial energy costs and improve regional supply chains. We would support Special Economic Zones tied to export transformation focused on current exports — turning timber into lumber, processing cashews and cocoa, and producing other value-added agricultural goods.

Then I’d focus on expanding Africa’s skilled human capital. The AfDB would invest in technical skills and tertiary education, supporting global skills partnerships and scholarships aligned with both African and global labor market needs. Countries like India and the Philippines have built global labor pipelines — Africa must follow. I want African labor to be indispensable to closing skilled labor gaps globally as demographic trends force a reckoning across the industrialized world.

In two decades, the goal would be for remittances to Africa to reach $250 billion annually. That number is already nearly $100 billion, surpassing FDI and official aid combined. Investing in higher skill levels would increase the quality and commensurate remuneration of our labor exports, driving up remittance volumes.

This is the path I would have followed — a lean and hyper-focused bank working in concert with others to close the human development gap on the continent.

W. Gyude Moore is Liberia’s former minister of public works. He is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC, and the current Boeing Visiting Faculty Chair in International Relations at Schwarzman College in Beijing’s Tsinghua University.

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