The African Development Bank Group's flagship New African Financial Architecture for Development (NAFAD) initiative is already operational, the institution's leaders told bankers, pension funds and investors at the Africa Financial Industry Summit (AFIS 2026) in Luanda on Tuesday, 3 November.
NAFAD is the Bank Group's framework aimed at reorganising how capital and risk are deployed across Africa's financial ecosystem.
The African Development Bank hosted a roundtable at the Africa Financial Industry Summit (AFIS) on Making NAFAD Work for Africa's Real Economy. The roundtable showcased the Pan African Guarantee Platform (PAGP) as a practical manifestation of NAFAD in action.
Through PAGP, NAFAD is already helping to transform, share and reallocate clearly defined risks to institutions best able to manage them, improving the credit profile and investability of transactions and enabling greater mobilisation of commercial and institutional capital.
"We have not formally launched it, but we are already doing it," said Manuel Moses, CEO of ATIDI, which is managing PAGP. "So, it's really operating."
Solomon Quaynor, the Bank's Vice President for Private Sector, Infrastructure and Industrialization, said NAFAD would build "different ecosystems for different purposes," with the Pan African Guarantee Platform as a model.
Quaynor pointed to the Alliance for Green Infrastructure in Africa (AGIA), launched by the Bank Group, Africa50 and the African Union at COP27, as a model. "It's a comparable example to what we're doing with ATIDI on the Pan-African Guarantee Platform," Quaynor said.
Didier Acouetey, Senior Advisor to the Bank's President on Private Sector Development and NAFAD, moderated the session. He said that NAFAD focused on better coordination among and between existing institutions rather than creating new institutions. Acouetey stressed that NAFAD had been designed from the bottom up, with the Bank consulting guarantee institutions, development banks, insurers, pension funds, stock exchanges, central banks and commercial banks as part of the process. NAFAD's architecture rests on de-risking, domestic resource mobilisation, regulation, and deeper, better-connected financial markets.
Asked by a commercial banker when NAFAD would "become real," Acouetey replied: "It has started." The Bank's Board approved a USD 125 million equity investment in African Trade & Investment Development Insurance or ATIDI in May 2026, Acouetey said, which would advance plans to lift its capital from about USD 1 billion to USD 2 billion, and then to USD 5 billion.
Ahmed Attout, Bank Group Director for Financial Sector Development, explained why the Bank had chosen ATIDI to run the platform. "There is only one ATIDI in Africa," he said, describing the platform as "a one-stop shop for guarantees across Africa."
ATIDI's Moses noted that 2026 marks 25 years of operations for the agency, and that it has helped mobilise USD 94 billion in investment since 2001.
ATIDI can mobilise 10 to 15 times every dollar of capital it receives, Moses said. It works through local lenders and investors rather than competing with them, including in local currency. In Nigeria, for instance, its guarantees helped issuers persuade regulators to approve 15-year naira financing.
Admassu Tadesse, Group President and CEO of the Trade and Development Bank Group (TDB), shared his experience as an ATIDI shareholder and client.
"There's a lot of capacity out there that's not being used," Tadesse said. "A platform can actually help systematise that." Charles Russon, Chief Executive Officer, Africa Regions, at ABSA Bank, commended the NAFAD platform as "potentially one of those big unlocks... This has to be about productive assets in the real economy. "
Denis Charles Kouassi, Director General of Côte d'Ivoire's national pension fund, CNPS, said pension funds have a very important role to play in this architecture, adding that CNPS needed new vehicles to invest in equities, "so that companies benefit from this money, and so that we, as investors, earn both dividends and capital gains."
Acouetey closed the session by inviting participants to engage with the Bank Group and the PAGP. "NAFAD is really open for business to everyone," he said.
