The President of the African Development Bank Group, Dr Sidi Ould Tah, delivered on Sunday 15 February 2026 his first-ever official address to the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union (AU) in Addis Ababa. Dr Ould Tah assumed office as the ninth President of the Bank on 1 September last year.

Addressing the Assembly, he presented the New African Financial Architecture (NAFA) as the strategic lever for significant resource mobilization and the foundation for a new African financial sovereignty.

In a action-oriented speech, Dr Ould Tah presented his vision for a New African Financial Architecture (NAFA), designed to profoundly transform the way the continent mobilizes and deploys its resources.

"Africa is not lacking in ambition. Agenda 2063 gives us a vision. Our National Energy Pacts, our trade agreements, our infrastructure frameworks, all of these give us plans," said Dr Ould Tah. "The problem is not a lack of resources. This is the architecture of risk and capital," he insisted.

He stressed that the Bank Group's new vision, anchored in the Four Cardinal Points and of which NAFA is a pillar, will enable the continent to change its paradigm and efficiently implement the priorities of the African Union's Agenda 2063. The Four Cardinal Points, the African Development Bank Group's strategic vision, will:

1. Unleash the power of African capital, so that savings and institutional funds finance the continent's development.
2. Rebuild Africa's financial sovereignty, with NAFA as the central instrument to mobilize and deploy resources at scale and strengthen Africa's position in global financial governance.
3. Transform the continent's demographic asset into an economic dividend, supporting youth and women's entrepreneurship and developing regional value chains.
4. Build resilient infrastructure with high added value, to accelerate industrialization and promote continental economic integration.

"NAFA is not a slogan. It is a deliberate reorganization of the way Africa mobilizes, allocates, and deploys its capital for development. A shift from fragmentation to coordination. From isolated transactions to systemic scale.. From dependence on external capital to financial sovereignty," insisted Dr Ould Tah.

This 39th Summit, which was held over two days, on February 14 and 15, focused on the following theme: "Ensuring the sustainable availability of safe water and sanitation systems to achieve the goals of Agenda 2063". The President of Burundi, Évariste Ndayishimiye, was elected the new current Chairperson of the AU for the year 2026, replacing Angolan President João Manuel Gonçalves Lourenço.

In a statement adopted on the African Development Bank's "key initiatives", African leaders congratulated President Ould Tah on his election as the head of the continent's leading development financial institution, terming it a reflection of "his ability to steer the institution in pursuing Africa's transformation and integration agenda".

The continent's Heads of State and Government welcomed President Ould Tah's strategic orientation based on the "Four Cardinals" and the New African Financial Architecture (NAFA). They asked for an update in the next six months on the operationalization of NAFA.