This hybrid launch will present findings from the working paper How African Development Banks Can Mobilise Resources for Green Structural Transformation, followed by a discussion with policymakers, practitioners and researchers.

​Africa faces a formidable investment and financing challenge for green structural transformation. The continent is estimated to require 1.5 trillion US dollars both to meet its sustainable development goals and its nationally determined contributions over 2020–2030, even as external debt has exceeded US$1 trillion and advanced economies have failed to deliver climate finance at the promised scale. In this context, attention is shifting towards regional and domestic resource mobilisation and especially to scaling long-term lending in domestic currency.

​ Development banks are central to this agenda, yet African development banks remain small relative to need. Africa hosts more than a quarter of the world’s development banks, but they collectively account for less than 1 percent of global development bank assets and are often undercapitalised. Understanding how these institutions can be scaled and repurposed for green structural transformation is therefore an urgent policy priority.

The working paper makes three main contributions:

  1. It maps the footprint of African development banks (ADBs) in terms of size, regional distribution, mandates and sectoral lending patterns, highlighting the uneven geographic and size distribution of ADBs across the continent.

  2. ​It provides a closer look at the four largest regional ADBs: the African Development Bank (AfDB), African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank), New Development Bank (NDB) and Africa Finance Corporation (AFC). It examines their portfolios, financial fundamentals and emerging climate-related commitments.

  3. It sets out policy options to scale ADBs for green structural transformation, including building a more coherent African financing system; expanding fiscal resource mobilisation and capitalisation of ADBs; and strengthening the role of multilateral development banks in supporting local-currency lending by ADBs.

The discussion will explore the implications of these findings for African decision-makers seeking to expand climate-compatible investment in manufacturing, agricultural modernisation and green infrastructure.