When Nardos Bekele-Thomas, CEO of AUDA-NEPAD, addressed the Africa-Europe Finance Ministers’ Platform during the World Bank Spring Meetings, she did not present a familiar narrative about Africa’s financing gap or make an appeal for aid. Instead, she articulated a principle.<\/p>\n
Speaking to finance ministers, central bank governors, multilateral development bank leaders and senior European Union officials, Bekele-Thomas drew a firm conclusion. The era of Africa as a passive aid recipient has ended. What must follow is a new phase defined by strategic co-investment, mutual benefit and meaningful structural reform.<\/p>\n
Her intervention focused on three urgent and interconnected challenges shaping Africa’s economic future and its relationship with Europe.<\/p>\n
The first concerned the European Union’s next long-term budget. The proposed 2028 to 2034 Multiannual Financial Framework allocates \u20ac60.5bn to Sub-Saharan Africa within a wider \u20ac215bn Global Europe envelope. For African governments, this is more than a financial commitment. It is a test of whether the rhetoric of mutually beneficial partnerships will translate into genuinely transformed relationships or simply repackage old forms of conditionality.<\/p>\n
Bekele-Thomas emphasised that Africa is ready to engage on different terms. The continent is aligning its Agenda 2063 with the EU’s Global Gateway initiative, offering bankable projects in sectors such as critical minerals, green hydrogen and digital infrastructure. However, she stressed that a true partnership requires reciprocity.<\/p>\n
This includes European support for local value addition rather than continued reliance on raw material exports, policy space for industrialisation and safeguards to ensure that climate measures do not become disguised trade barriers. She pointed in particular to the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, warning that while designed as a climate tool, it risks penalising the very manufacturing growth Africa needs to climb the global value chain.<\/p>\n
The second issue addressed the persistent drain of resources from the continent. Bekele-Thomas reframed the widely cited figure of $88bn lost annually to illicit financial flows not as a failure of African governance, but as a systemic flaw in the global financial architecture.<\/p>\n
She proposed practical solutions. One was to open the Global Emerging Markets Risk Database, currently restricted to multilateral development banks, to private investors. This database contains three decades of credit performance data across numerous institutions. Making it accessible could reduce information asymmetry and significantly lower borrowing costs, which currently impose an estimated $15.6bn annual burden on African economies.<\/p>\n
She also called for more inclusive global tax reform, with African countries participating as equal partners rather than rule-takers in processes dominated by the OECD. In addition, she highlighted the importance of establishing the Africa Credit Risk Agency, a continental body designed to provide more accurate and context-sensitive credit assessments, challenging external ratings that often misprice African risk.<\/p>\n
The third pillar of her message was opportunity. Bekele-Thomas pointed to GreenAlpha, an initiative positioning Africa’s green industrial infrastructure as an institutional-grade asset class. With more than \u20ac30 trillion held in European pension funds seeking long-term, climate-aligned investments, the potential alignment is clear. Unlocking this capital, however, depends on reducing Africa’s cost of capital, a goal directly linked to reforms such as improved risk data transparency and credible continental credit institutions.<\/p>\n
Beyond these proposals, Bekele-Thomas argued for broader reforms to global financial governance. At the United Nations level, she called for full implementation of the Sevilla Platform for Action, support for a UN Tax Convention and the creation of a permanent Borrowers’ Forum to give debtor nations a collective voice. At the G20 level, she urged the adoption of multi-year roadmaps for multilateral development bank reform, backed by accountability mechanisms. Within the banks themselves, she stressed that initiatives such as the World Bank’s Evolution Roadmap must move from ambition to delivery, with counter-cyclical lending at their core.<\/p>\n
Her closing message was direct. Africa is ready with investable projects, a unified continental voice through the African Union and scalable platforms such as GreenAlpha. What it seeks from Europe is not assistance, but equivalent ambition. This includes democratising access to risk data, supporting global tax reform, advancing African-led financial institutions and ensuring that development banks respond more effectively to economic shocks.<\/p>\n
The timing is critical. With the next EU budget cycle beginning in 2028, Bekele-Thomas argued that the framework should be co-designed now, not as a traditional donor-recipient arrangement, but as a partnership between co-investors in a shared and sustainable future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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