Africa faces a structural development financing gap exceeding $400 billion per year. This gap does not primarily reflect a lack of capital — the continent holds approximately $4 trillion in domestic long-term savings — but rather deep structural constraints: institutional fragmentation, inefficient risk allocation, limited balance-sheet leverage, and insufficient coordination between public and private capital. The New African Financial Architecture for Development (NAFAD), led by the African Development Bank Group, aims to respond to this diagnosis with a system-level framework that reorganises how capital and risk are deployed across Africa’s financial ecosystem. Dr Sidi Ould Tah, President of the African Development Bank Group, sets out what the architecture will actually do, by when, and how.