The African Development Bank (AfDB) is ramping up efforts to draw more private capital into Africa’s biggest development projects, using closer partnerships with global insurers and export credit agencies as its main lever.
That ambition was on full display in Rabat, Morocco, where the Bank brought together more than 50 insurers, brokers, ECAs and risk-mitigation specialists for its fourth Insurer & ECA Day, held ahead of the 2025 Africa Investment Forum Market Days.
One of the headline moments came from the Berne Union, the global association for export credit and investment insurers. Its president, Yuichiro Akita, announced that the AfDB had become the first multilateral development bank ever accepted as a member, effectively giving the Bank a direct line into an industry that deployed around $140 billion in insurance capacity to emerging markets last year.
AfDB officials said the step is expected to make it easier to structure guarantees, insurance-backed lending, and risk-sharing tools to get more private financiers comfortable with African markets.
The Bank’s Chief Economist, Dr Kevin Chika Urama, underscored why the push matters. Africa’s economic outlook remains solid, he said, with sectors such as agritech and agribusiness on track to reach a combined value of $1 trillion by 2030. Renewable energy markets could be even larger, potentially hitting $1.3 trillion, thanks in part to the continent holding nearly half of the world’s renewable energy potential.
But translating those opportunities into investment requires more collaboration with insurers and credit-guarantee providers, according to AfDB Vice-President for Finance and CFO Hassatou Diop N’Sele. She told participants that many had previously asked the Bank for earlier engagement and greater visibility into its processes and pipeline. The 2025 edition of the event, she said, was designed to offer exactly that.
The AfDB has already been leaning heavily on guarantees to attract private money. Since 2014, it has executed guarantee transactions worth $2.3 billion, helping mobilise about $5.2 billion for projects in eight countries, according to Max Ndiaye, Senior Director for Syndication and Client Solutions at the Africa Investment Forum.
Detailed technical sessions in Rabat explored how to better allocate risks between sovereign and private borrowers, the type of information insurers need before underwriting, and how ECAs can be brought into projects much earlier. The Bank’s Risk Office also pushed back against what it described as outdated assumptions about Africa’s risk profile, pointing to data from the Global Emerging Markets Risk Database showing that Africa posts the best recovery rates on defaults globally.
To give participants a sense of what is coming, the AfDB also unveiled its 2026 pipeline, more than $20 billion worth of projects. These include the $12 billion Bishoftu International Airport in Ethiopia and Angola’s Unicargas logistics project, both of which have the Bank as lead arranger.
Closing the event, Senior Vice-President Marie-Laure Akin-Olugbade said the Insurer & ECA Day has become central to the Bank’s strategy under incoming President Sidi Ould Tah. With African governments facing fiscal pressures, she said the continent’s development push increasingly depends on how successfully institutions like the AfDB can mobilise private finance.
