Arab Coordination Group and AfDB Launch New Strategic Partnership to Scale Investment in Africa

The consultation reflects a shared ambition among ACG members to deepen engagement across the continent—deploying capital in a more coordinated, catalytic, and impact-driven manner.

The Arab Coordination Group (ACG) and the African Development Bank Group (AfDB) today launched a new phase of their partnership aimed at scaling co-financing, mobilising private capital, and accelerating Africa’s economic transformation.

The announcement followed a High-Level Consultation Meeting held at the AfDB’s headquarters in Abidjan, marking a shift from fragmented cooperation toward programmatic, large-scale co-investment aligned with Africa’s development priorities.

The renewed partnership comes at a critical moment, as Africa faces a widening development financing gap and growing urgency to mobilise capital at scale for energy access, climate resilience, food security, regional integration, and private-sector-led growth.

The consultation reflects a shared ambition among ACG members to deepen engagement across the continent—deploying capital in a more coordinated, catalytic, and impact-driven manner.

From Cooperation to Scaled Co-Investment

Discussions focused on how the ACG and AfDB can jointly anchor Arab–African co-financing, leveraging their combined balance sheets, long-term and counter-cyclical financing capacity, sectoral expertise, and country platforms.

Participants explored concrete pathways to:

• Strengthen joint project preparation

• Harmonise financing approaches

• Coordinate investment pipelines

• Enhance policy dialogue

• Mobilise private capital alongside public finance

The goal is to unlock larger, more resilient investment flows that support country-led development agendas while delivering measurable, long-term impact.

The consultation also aligns with the AfDB’s push to strengthen Africa’s financial sovereignty through a New African Financial Architecture (NAFA)—an initiative designed to better integrate development finance institutions, guarantee providers, insurers, capital markets, and private investors.

Joint Declaration Sets Roadmap for Action

The meeting concluded with the adoption of a Joint Declaration on a Strategic Partnership between the ACG and the AfDB. The declaration sets out a shared political vision and translates it into operational priorities and follow-up mechanisms to guide the next phase of the Arab–African partnership.

As a key next step, the partners agreed to develop a Financing and Operational Partnership Framework, to be considered in 2026, which will define modalities for:

• Co-financing structures

• Pipeline coordination

• Mutual reliance mechanisms

• Regular joint programming

The declaration also underscores the central role of the African Development Fund (ADF)—the AfDB Group’s concessional financing arm—in supporting low-income and fragile countries, and calls for exploring deeper collaboration between ACG institutions and the ADF.

The partnership signals a move toward investment at scale, positioning Arab and African development finance institutions as anchors for mobilising global capital to support Africa’s growth, resilience, and economic transformation.