What would make Sidi Ould Tah smile?, By Chinedu Moghalu

One year is too soon to gauge satisfaction, but long enough to judge the direction. Tah has begun to connect capital mobilisation, risk-sharing, project preparation and internal reform. The record may justify a cautious smile, but satisfaction must await delivery.

After a year in office, Sidi Ould Tah has begun to reshape how the African Development Bank raises money and prepares projects. Delivery, however, is the harder test.

On 29 May 2025, shortly after his election as the ninth president of the African Development Bank Group, Tah stood before the Bank’s governors and guests at the Sofitel Abidjan Hôtel Ivoire. His expression gave little away. Stoic, almost solemn, he thanked Africa, the Bank’s partners and those gathered in the room, then said simply:

“Let’s go to work now, I’m ready!”

Three months later, on 1 September, he took office. A year on, the question is whether the initiatives of his first 12 months amount to a coherent architecture for finance and delivery, and whether that architecture can produce results.

Tah inherited a financially strong institution, with $318 billion in authorised capital and triple-A credit ratings. Much of that capital is callable, underpinning the Bank’s creditworthiness and lending capacity, rather than representing cash available for projects. The setting beyond the Bank is much less forgiving. The Bank puts the annual shortfall through 2030 in transport, education, energy and productivity-enhancing technology at $402.2 billion; the wider gap in financing the Sustainable Development Goals is greater still. S&P Global Ratings estimates that rated African sovereigns face about $90 billion in principal repayments on external debt in 2026.

The Four Cardinal Points

The Bank’s Ten-Year Strategy for 2024–33 remains its strategic horizon. Within it, Tah’s Four Cardinal Points – unlocking Africa’s capital power; rebuilding its financial sovereignty; turning demographics into a dividend; and building resilient infrastructure and competitive value chains – set the immediate order of work and the basis for greater selectivity. The Bank Governors endorsed them in May 2026.

The first-year record is strongest on capital mobilisation and financial sovereignty; demographics and infrastructure present the sterner test. Between 12 million and 15 million young Africans enter the labour market each year, while only about three million formal jobs are created. The demographic dividend will be earned not by counting beneficiaries but by raising productivity and creating secure, productive work. The same discipline applies to infrastructure, where resilience lies not in isolated assets but in corridors connecting energy, transport and digital systems to production zones and markets, and in the regional value chains those corridors can sustain.

Credit, With Continuity

Little more than 100 days into Tah’s presidency, the seventeenth replenishment of the African Development Fund was completed. The Fund, which provides grants and concessional loans to 37 low-income and fragile countries, secured a record $11 billion for 2026–28, representing 23 per cent above the previous round, though still well short of the earlier $25 billion ambition and without a pledge from the US.

Tah’s New African Financial Architecture for Development is an attempt to turn that diagnosis into policy. It has brought the continent’s leading financial institutions together around an 11-point Abidjan Consensus, adopted in April, covering project preparation, domestic capital mobilisation, risk-sharing and institutional coordination. The first implementation report, due at the African Union’s coordination meeting in October, will show whether agreement is beginning to yield transactions.

The replenishment was an important early success, rooted in work by governors, the Board, Bank staff, eligible countries and partners that began before Tah’s term and continued through 2025, with Tah steering its difficult final phase to a strong close. At the London meeting, 23 African countries pledged $182.7 million, 19 of them contributing for the first time; by May 2026, further pledges had brought the number to 25 and the total to more than $190 million.

Those pledges will finance the Fund’s grants and concessional loans in 2026–28. Alongside them, but outside the $11 billion replenishment, are offers of up to $2 billion in co-financing from the OPEC Fund and up to $800 million from the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa.

Africa’s Own Capital

The 2026 African Economic Outlook estimates that Africa’s commercial banks, pension funds, insurers, sovereign wealth funds and central banks hold assets worth more than $4 trillion. Yet institutional investors allocate less than 2.7 per cent of their assets to infrastructure and other productive sectors on the continent.

Those assets belong to pensioners, policyholders, depositors, governments and other investors, and their managers answer to rules on risk, return, liquidity and permitted holdings. Political exhortation will not unlock them to finance roads, power plants or factories. Projects must be well prepared, commercially sound and protected against risks that investors cannot reasonably bear; smaller ones must often be pooled before they are large enough to attract institutional money.

Tah’s New African Financial Architecture for Development is an attempt to turn that diagnosis into policy. It has brought the continent’s leading financial institutions together around an 11-point Abidjan Consensus, adopted in April, covering project preparation, domestic capital mobilisation, risk-sharing and institutional coordination. The first implementation report, due at the African Union’s coordination meeting in October, will show whether agreement is beginning to yield transactions.

The Bank’s investment in African Trade and Investment Development Insurance, or ATIDI, gives the architecture its clearest institutional expression. On 22 May, the Board approved up to $125 million in equity. By July, ATIDI reported that the Bank’s participation had increased fivefold, making it the insurer’s largest institutional shareholder. Tah wants that backing to help lift ATIDI’s annual guarantee capacity from about $3 billion to $10 billion.

Guarantees are central because they cover an agreed share of losses arising from political or credit risks that investors cannot carry alone. They cannot rescue a poor project, but they can make a sound one investable – enabling a bank to lend, a pension fund to participate and a transaction to reach financial close. The Bank’s larger stake in ATIDI is established; its worth will be measured in additional guarantees written, private capital mobilised and viable projects financed.

…Tah’s proposed reform of the operating model is more than an administrative exercise. The promise of a more agile institution, closer to member countries and the people it serves, will count for little unless authority and responsibility for delivery move with it. Decisions need to be taken closer to countries, while the mobilisation of private capital must begin in project design rather than after approval.

From Pipeline to Production

Africa50 illustrates the less visible work required before capital can be deployed. The Alliance for Green Infrastructure in Africa Project Development Fund predates Tah’s presidency and reached its first close in August 2025. A year later, Italy’s Cassa Depositi e Prestiti and France’s Proparco committed a further $50 million. The fund is seeking $400 million for feasibility studies, design and transaction structuring, and hopes thereby to build a prospective pipeline of up to $10 billion in bankable green-infrastructure projects.

Elsewhere, three recent approvals range across skills, digital connectivity and industrial production. In Ghana, a $71.55 million grant is expected to train 28,000 people and create about the same number of direct and indirect jobs over four years. In Nigeria, a $200 million Bank loan for Project BRIDGE forms part of an $800 million sovereign package within a wider public-private financing plan estimated at $2 billion. The project would lay 90,000km of open-access fibre, connect all 774 local government areas and establish cross-border links with Benin, Cameroon, Niger and Chad. In Morocco, the Bank has approved a €100 million loan for an integrated battery plant and will seek to arrange up to €141 million more. Their worth will be decided by the training, connections, local production and jobs they eventually deliver.

The Bank At Work

The same test applies inside the Bank, where Tah’s proposed reform of the operating model is more than an administrative exercise. The promise of a more agile institution, closer to member countries and the people it serves, will count for little unless authority and responsibility for delivery move with it. Decisions need to be taken closer to countries, while the mobilisation of private capital must begin in project design rather than after approval.

The Bank’s own evaluations show why this matters. A 2025 review found that a decade of decentralisation had delivered only 53 per cent of its intended outcomes, with shortfalls in authority, staffing and process. A later study reached an equally uncomfortable conclusion: the selectivity framework had changed how projects were described more than what the Bank financed, in part because staff were still rewarded for volume and approvals.

Reform will count only if projects are prepared and procured more quickly, first disbursements come sooner, portfolio performance improves and every dollar of Bank exposure draws in more outside capital. Publishing those measures consistently would allow governors, investors and citizens to judge reform by evidence rather than intent or announcements.

The Measure

The achievement will be measured when electricity reaches a home and keeps a factory running; when fibre carries a small business into a larger market; when an African mineral is processed on the continent before export; when a pension fund earns a sound return from an African asset; and when a young person finds dependable work in the industries these investments make possible.

One year is too soon to gauge satisfaction, but long enough to judge the direction. Tah has begun to connect capital mobilisation, risk-sharing, project preparation and internal reform. The record may justify a cautious smile, but satisfaction must await delivery.

Chinedu Moghalu is a lawyer, strategic communications expert, and public policy adviser with over two decades of leadership across government, international organisations, and development institutions.