The top job at the African Development Bank is up for grabs, with the election slated for May 29. Five candidates vying to lead the bank have been sharing their visions for the next five years.
The search for a new president of Africa’s top financial institution, the African Development Bank (AfDB), is gathering momentum.
The current head, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, who is serving his second five-year term, will step down from the position on August 31, 2025.
Under his leadership, the AfDB has largely prioritized promoting economic and social development on the continent.
It is a vision that Adesina told DW he has passionately pursued during his tenure and one he believes has helped stabilize many African economies over the past five years.
“Despite the headwinds that Africa has faced globally in terms of global inflation, but also in terms of rising debt levels and depreciation of currencies and of course climate change, Africa continues to post very resilient growth,” he said.
Eleven out of the 20 fastest-growing economies in the world last year came from Africa, according to the AfDB, and Adesina says this shows the bank is doing something right.
However, he told DW that there are still challenges that require real solutions.
“We still need to provide a lot of concessional financing to African countries because there is still a tapering effect of the Covid-19 situation that many of the countries are still coping with,” Adesina said.
Who are the candidates?
The five candidates seeking to take over from Adesina includeSenegal’s Amadou Hott, who served as Senegal’s Minister of Economy, Planning and Cooperation (2019-2022), Dr. Samuel Munzele Maimbo from Zambia, who is currently the Vice President for Budget, Performance Review, and Strategic Planning at the World Bank and Mauritania’s Sidi Ould Tah, a former President of the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa.
The other two contenders are Chad’s Abbas Mahamat Tolli, an economist and a former Governor of the Bank of Central African States, as well as the only female candidate, South African Bajabulile Swazi Tshabalala. She is the former Senior Vice President of the African Development Bank.
The five candidates have utilized various public engagements to highlight the key priority areas they would focus on if elected to the top job.
What are the key priorities?
Senegal’s Amadou Hott says the bank needs to invest more in education to develop the continent’s human capital.
“We have to invest more in education; we need to invest more in skilled development. It is not just to have education and skills, but to have job opportunities,” he told a recent session held for the five candidates at the Brooklyn institution.
“Our biggest challenge is that we have tens of millions of young people, men and women, who are on the job market and they are not finding opportunities. So, whatever we do, we have to make sure that our economies are generating more jobs and activities so that people can have incomes,” he stressed as he made a case for his bid.
Dr. Samuel Munzele Maimbo from Zambia told DW that his focus would be to ensure that most governments receive the necessary financial support to grow their respective economies.
Kenya is one of the biggest beneficiaries of AfDB loans, which went into the Lake Turkana Wind Power project (LTWP) for example.Image: Getty Images/AFP/Y. Chiba
“I want to make sure that we are supporting governments as best we can to navigate a very complex, polarized environment,” Maimbo said, adding that the bank has a sizable amount of concessional financing to support governments, but that ultimately their number one goal was “ensuring that economies are growing quickly.”
Chad’s Abbas Mahamat Tolli wants the bank to champion the push for African economies to diversify and shore up their revenue base. He said that this can be achieved by investing in renewable energy.
“We need to focus on renewable energy so that we can have reliable and sustainable energy. We also need to invest in the infrastructure and agriculture sectors,” Tolli said, signaling that these would be priorities for him.
Maximizing the youth’s potential
For Mauritania’s Tah, his key focus would be maximizing the potential of the continent’s youthful population, and investing in agriculture.
“We need to work on my demography and turn it into power. We need to use our natural resources and transform our wealth into prosperity,” he stated.
Many African countries still grapple with basic infrastructure, such as a steady supply of electricity.Image: Ahmed Jallanzo/epa/picture alliance
He said the bank must encourage African countries to add value to their natural resources and transform those products into a vital source of revenue for growth. Investing in women and children is also a key focus for Tah.
Bajabulile Swazi, the only female candidate in the race, wants the bank to focus on productivity and infrastructure enhancement.
“Africa’s productivity is behind those of many other regions in the rest of the world and that productivity gap arises because of the infrastructure gap,” she highlighted.
“In my view it is not possible to create jobs to industrialize to do any of these ambitious things without basic infrastructure. That includes roads, that includes electricity.”
The key vote to select one of the five candidates will take place during the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Bank in Abidjan, the Ivorian capital, on May 29.
The focus likely will be on identifying who among the five shortlisted candidates can best advance the bank’s agenda into the future.
Mitigating the impact of climate change
AfDB’s current President Adesina admitted that in the future, the bank must also tackle the impact of climate change on African countries, whose economies are reeling under its effects, despite not being major contributors to it.
“The issue is to make sure that we support African countries that did not cause climate change to be able to adapt to climate change and that is what we are doing at the African Development Bank,” he said.
The African Development Bank provides loans, grants, and technical assistance to African governments and private companies for projects and programs that support development.
These support programs aim to reduce poverty, improve living conditions, and foster sustainable growth on the continent. Adesina’s tenure has also been focused on projecting Africa as a conducive investment destination, an initiative he says is a priority area for the bank.
“We take pride in marketing as an investment destination and one of the areas that we believe African countries can do better is how they get paid for their natural resources,” he said. “If we are able to get good public financial management and make sure we are managing our natural resources very well, we can mobilize enough resources to deal with many of [our] issues.”
Edited by: Chrispin Mwakideu
