The African Development Bank Group secured major political momentum for the New African Financial Architecture for Development (NAFAD) at the Africa Forward Summit, as African leaders, international partners and development institutions rallied behind a transformative pan-African guarantee mechanism designed to unlock investment, lower the cost of capital and accelerate job creation across the continent.
Held in Nairobi under the joint leadership of President William Ruto and President Emmanuel Macron, the Summit brought together Heads of State and Government, multilateral institutions, global investors and private sector leaders around a shared agenda: repositioning Africa at the centre of global growth through a new model of partnership based on co-investment, sovereign equality and African-led financial solutions.
Africa Forward Summit co-hosts, Presidents William Ruto and Emmanuel Macron share the stage during the closing plenary.
In his interventions, the President of the African Development Bank Group, Dr Sidi Ould Tah, presented NAFAD as a bold African-led response to one of the continent’s most pressing structural constraints: the inability to transform abundant liquidity into investable capital at scale. He stressed that Africa’s challenge is not a lack of capital, but rather a lack of mechanisms capable of transforming risk and crowding in long-term investment.
“Africa is not capital poor. Africa is risk-transformation poor,” President Ould Tah stated.
He noted that although Africa faces an annual development financing gap exceeding $400 billion, the continent holds nearly $4 trillion in domestic savings. Yet Africa attracts only 1% of global institutional capital and just 4% of global foreign direct investment.
President Ould Tah highlighted that every year between 12 and 15 million young Africans enter the labour market while only around 3 million formal jobs are created. He identified a critical annual guarantee and insurance gap estimated at $40-$50 billion as one of the principal reasons why transformative investments fail to reach financial close across the continent.
The Summit marked a breakthrough for the operationalisation of NAFAD, which was endorsed by African Heads of State during the African Union Summit earlier this year and further anchored through the Abidjan Consensus adopted last month. Under the NAFAD framework, the African Development Bank Group will leverage its triple-A balance sheet, convening power and partnerships to strengthen African financial institutions capable of mobilising investment at scale.
At the centre of this first phase stands ATIDI, the Nairobi-based pan-African investment and credit insurer identified as the flagship institution to anchor Africa’s continental guarantee architecture.
The initiative received strong political backing throughout the Summit.
An estimated 5,000 participants attended the Africa Forward Summit, held in Nairobi, Kenya.
President Ruto called for the recapitalisation of ATIDI as “a critical pillar of the new Africa financial architecture for development,” emphasising that Africa must increasingly finance itself through stronger continental financial institutions and innovative risk-sharing mechanisms.
President Macron announced France’s intention to support the scaling of ATIDI and endorsed the development of a continental first-loss guarantee strategy centred around the Nairobi-based institution. He described the initiative as part of “a new financial paradigm” capable of advancing Africa’s prosperity and strategic autonomy.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres praised African leadership in advancing reforms of the global financial architecture and highlighted the African Development Bank Group’s role in “mobilising African resources for African priorities and prosperity.”
The discussions in Nairobi reflected a broader consensus that Africa’s future development model must move beyond traditional aid paradigms toward a system capable of mobilising African savings, attracting institutional capital, deepening local capital markets and scaling private investment into infrastructure, energy, industrialisation and job creation.
President Ould Tah underscored that NAFAD is not a new institution, but rather a coordination framework designed to align African and international financial actors around four principles: subsidiarity, complementarity, coordination and disciplined risk transformation.
Referencing the scaling of ATIDI as the first concrete deliverable of NAFAD, the Bank Group President stressed that Africa now has both the institutional platform and political momentum required to accelerate implementation.
“The political moment is now. The institution exists. The approach is endorsed. The capital pathway is mapped,” he said. “What remains is a collective decision to scale Africa’s financial firepower in support of Africa’s transformation.”
The Summit also recognised the African Development Bank Group’s leadership in identifying structural gaps in Africa’s financial architecture and advancing coordinated solutions capable of mobilising domestic savings, deepening local capital markets and crowding in long-term institutional investment.
The outcomes of the Africa Forward Summit are expected to feed directly into upcoming global discussions on international financial reform, including the G7 Leaders’ Summit in Evian, France and broader efforts to reshape development finance around investment, risk-sharing, institutional coordination and economic sovereignty.
