Conceived and championed by the African Development Bank Group, the New African Financial Architecture for Development (NAFAD) is an African-led initiative designed to reshape how development finance is mobilised, de-risked and deployed across the continent. Dr Sidi Ould Tah, President of the African Development Bank Group, together with Samaila Zubairu, President & CEO of the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC) and Dr George Elombi, President & Chairman of the Board of Directors of the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank), discuss where NAFAD intervenes in the regulatory, guarantee and risk assessment space, what balance-sheet capacity it can realistically mobilise, and whether local-currency markets can reduce Africa’s structural exposure to costly foreign-currency debt. The conversation moves from diagnosis to decision.
Key points
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Where does NAFAD intervene – guarantee, first-loss, risk assessment – and what does that mean for existing DFIs?
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Which reforms would turn the architecture from a coordination framework into deployable capital?
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Can local-currency markets absorb enough sovereign risk to reduce dollar dependency at scale?