The New African Financial Architecture for Development (NAFAD) is no longer a blueprint – it is a set of active choices about which institutions anchor it, where guarantees sit, and how risk is priced and distributed across the system. Three of its principal architects 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?