Amidst shifting winds of global trade, the African Developement Banks anual meetings for 2025, will begin holding from tomorrow May 26th to 30th in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, at the Bank’s headquarters, under the theme: “Making Africa’s Capital Work Better for Africa’s Development.”
This strategic theme calls on African member countries to look within the continent to identify and harness Africa’s diverse capital resources – human, natural, financial, and commercial – to drive the continent’s structural transformation.
Forty-seven of Africa’s fifty-four countries have been affected by the present shifting winds of global trade, emerging from the United States recent trade measures, with 22 of them, facing tariffs of up to 50% on a wide range of exports.
In the present context of evolving U.S. foreign assistance priorities, and reduced USAID funding, African nations are navigating a changing landscape where traditional funding sources can no longer be taken for granted.
These four days of brain storming, will offer participants the opportunity to address these challenges, boost domestic production, build regional value chains, to negotiate from a position of strength.
It will be an opportunity for the continent to strengthen its internal markets, diversify its trade partners, and take greater control of its economic destiny.
Speaking on CNN recently, African Development Bank President Dr Akinwumi Adesina warned that, these policy shocks could trigger significant economic disruptions.
“When those currencies weaken,” he noted, “you’re going to find that high inflation becomes a problem… and the cost of servicing foreign currency debt is going to get worse.”
As a solution to this difficult trends, Adesina highlighted constructive engagement with the United States, diversification of export markets, and most crucially, acceleration of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) – a $3.4 trillion internal market that could redefine the continent’s economic future.
That will also mean deepening regional markets, boosting local value addition and rethinking how Africa mobilises and deploys its resources – not as fragments of foreign assistance, but as catalysts for self-driven, large-scale development.
This also means leveraging Africa’s human capital, its green energy potential, and its vast resources – from lithium to labour – to strike fairer deals and drive value addition at home.
All this while, The African Development Bank, has been Africa’s premier development partner, and only from within this institution can the continent survive the present difficulties to emerge stronger.
For more than a decade, the African Development Bank has laid the groundwork for such a transformation.
This institution has invested over $55 billion in infrastructure, mobilised more than $225 billion in investment interest through the Africa Investment Forum, and is leveraging partnerships with multilateral development banks for transformative projects like Mission 300 — an initiative to bring electricity access to 300 million Africans by 2030.
More than 6,000 delegates, including African heads of state and government, finance ministers, central bank governors, development partners, private sector representatives, civil society leaders, academics, think tanks and opinion leaders, NGOs, and other stakeholders, are expected to take part in what promises to be a defining event.
During the meetings, governors of the African Development Bank will elect a successor to current Group President, Dr. Adesina, whose second five-year term ends on 31 August.
