Dr Sidi Ould Tah, a Mauritanian, became the ninth President of the African Development Bank Group. He took office on 1 September 2025, for an initial five-year term, with the objective of repositioning the Bank to act with greater agility, accountability and proximity to its clients, in the service of Africa’s economic transformation.

He has begun this repositioning around his strategic vision, the “Four Cardinal Points”: Unlock Africa’s Capital Power; Rebuild Africa’s Financial Sovereignty; Turn Demographics into a Dividend; Build Resilient Infrastructure and Competitive Value Chains. At its heart is the New African Financial Architecture for Development (NAFAD) — resting on subsidiarity, complementarity, coordination and risk transformation.

NAFAD aims at mobilising the continent’s own resources, alongside those of the Bank Group’s partners, to help close Africa’s estimated $400 billion annual development financing gap.

Since taking office, this vision has translated into action: the seventeenth replenishment of the African Development Fund (ADF-17), the Bank Group’s concessional window, concluded in December 2025 with a record $11 billion mobilised. The African Union Summit endorsed NAFAD in February 2026; and in Brazzaville in May 2026, the Board of Governors Four Cardinal Points made the Four Cardinal Points the institution’s strategic direction.

An economist and development finance leader with extensive public-sector and multilateral experience, Dr Sidi Ould Tah served as President of the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (BADEA) from 2015 to 2025, during which the institution moved from unrated to AAA/Aa1/AA+ credit ratings. He also served as Mauritania’s Minister of Economy and Finance from 2008 to 2015.

Dr Sidi Ould Tah holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, France. He is fluent in Arabic, French and English, and has a working knowledge of Portuguese and Spanish.