By Bruno Ittia*
The debate about Africa’s development has never suffered from a shortage of diagnosis. For decades, the continent’s challenges have been mapped, modelled, and presented in conference rooms across Washington, Geneva, and Brussels, often with great sophistication and genuine concern, and often without the people most directly affected sitting at the table where conclusions are drawn. What has been in shorter supply is something harder to manufacture: the sustained, institutionalised presence of African analytical and political leadership in the spaces where the decisions that shape the continent are actually made. On April 15, 2026, at the Washington Plaza Hotel, that gap narrowed in ways worth examining closely.
The Africa @ World Bank/IMF Spring Meetings, now in its second edition, convened by the Nkafu Policy Institute together with AUDA-NEPAD, Afrobarometer, and the African Institute for Development Policy, brought together ministers, economists, business leaders, and development partners for a daylong symposium running deliberately alongside the World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings. The proximity was intentional. So was the ambition. Under the theme Accelerating Africa’s Transformation, four panels tackled youth employment, intra-continental trade, health financing, and water security, as connected dimensions of a single, larger question: whether the international financing system is prepared to engage with Africa on African terms. What was said in that room deserves a wider audience than those who were present. Those who want to be part of the next edition, taking place on October 14, 2026 in Bangkok, Thailand, can register their interest now.
A System Problem, not a Jobs Problem
The most urgent expression of that question is employment, and the convening addressed it without softening the diagnosis. Africa does not simply lack jobs. As Hon. Dr. Musenero Masanza, Uganda’s Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, argued directly, the continent lacks the systems that generate productive, formal, well-paid work at the scale its population demands. Regulatory environments designed for large corporations rather than entrepreneurs, urban infrastructure that isolates workers from opportunity rather than connecting them to it, and education systems producing qualifications without relevant skills have together created a structural gap that economic growth alone cannot close. Dr. Somik Lall of the World Bank made the urban argument with particular force: Africa’s cities, properly resourced and connected, are among the most powerful tools available for workforce development. The opportunity is there. The architecture to capture it is not yet built.
That argument draws its full weight from a number Dr. Abebe Selassie, Director of the African Department at the IMF, placed before the room in his keynote address: by 2035, one in every two new entrants into the global labour market will come from Sub-Saharan Africa. That is not a projection about a distant future. It describes a transformation already underway, one that will reshape global capital flows and geopolitical influence whether or not international financing institutions are ready to engage with it seriously. More than half of Africa’s young people, Afrobarometer survey data across 38 countries showed, would rather build their own enterprise than seek formal employment. That preference is a rational response to systems that were not designed with them in mind, and it will not change until those systems do.
Reform First, Investment Follows
When H.E. Cheikh Tidiane Dieye, Minister of Hydraulics and Sanitation of Senegal, and Dr. Badr Abdelatty, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Egypt, engaged directly with questions of project bankability, governance reform, and blended finance instruments at the April 15 convening, they were not describing aspirations. They were describing the terms on which their governments are prepared to act. Minister Dieye’s central argument applies well beyond the water sector: investment follows reform, it does not precede it. Governments that build transparent, predictable policy environments will attract capital. Those waiting for capital to arrive before they reform will wait indefinitely.
That sequencing argument has significant implications for how development finance institutions structure their engagement with African governments. Conditionality imposed from outside has a poor track record. Reform ownership driven from inside, supported by financing that rewards rather than substitutes for good governance, has a considerably better one. Africa has ministers prepared to make that case with force and specificity, as the Africa @ World Bank/IMF Spring Meetings demonstrated. The international system needs interlocutors prepared to respond in kind.
Health and the Politics of Accountability
Africa carries between 23 and 25 percent of the global disease burden while accounting for just one percent of global health spending. That gap is well known. Less discussed is what sustains it. Elizabeth Lule, Executive Director of the Early Childhood Development Action Network and Board Chair of AFIDEP, placed the numbers before participants in Washington with precision: African governments allocate an average of 17 dollars per capita to health, against a recognised minimum of 90 dollars, while declining international assistance accelerates the pressure on already strained systems. But Lule’s sharpest argument was political rather than financial. When leaders and elites can exit a country’s public health system entirely, travelling abroad for treatment their own citizens cannot access, the domestic political pressure to build better systems is substantially reduced. The people with the most influence over health policy become the people with the least personal stake in its quality. That is a governance failure as much as a financing one, and additional external funding will not resolve it.
Efficiency, accountability, and the reconstruction of domestic political constituencies for quality public services are not soft complements to the financing agenda. In the African health context, they are prerequisites for it.
Trade and the Unfinished Architecture
Intra-African trade at 16 percent of total continental commerce, compared to 68 percent within the European Union, is not a measure of Africa’s productive limitations. Mavis Owusu-Gyamfi, President and CEO of the African Center for Economic Transformation, was direct at the April 15 convening: the gap is about conditions, not capacity. The African Continental Free Trade Area provides a framework of genuine promise, but frameworks without implementation infrastructure are not policies. Cross-border digital payment systems, harmonised regulations, and an industrial base capable of producing goods that African markets want to buy from each other are the unglamorous prerequisites for the continental market AfCFTA promises. Hannah Ryder of Development Reimagined put the manufacturing imperative plainly: Africa cannot become a trading power by exporting raw materials and importing finished goods indefinitely. That shift requires sustained investment in institutional and physical infrastructure, and data systems capable of telling policymakers what is working and what is not.
The Table Has Been Set. Now Come the Hard Commitments
The Africa @ World Bank/IMF Meeting platform exists because proximity to power matters. Positioning African analytical capacity and political leadership in direct dialogue with the institutions that govern development finance is not symbolic work. It is the structural work of changing the terms on which Africa’s priorities are heard and acted upon. As Dr. Denis Foretia, Executive Chairman of the Nkafu Policy Institute, framed it in his opening remarks on April 15: African priorities have too long been discussed without Africans. The platform is a sustained, institutionalised effort to correct that, edition by edition, argument by argument.
What the Africa @ World Bank/IMF Spring Meetings demonstrated is that the arguments are sharp, the evidence is solid, and the political will among African leaders is real. What the continent’s development trajectory now requires is an international financing system prepared to engage with that reality on African terms, rather than continuing to engage with an Africa constructed from outdated assumptions.
The next edition of the Africa @ World Bank/IMF Meetings takes place on October 14, 2026, in Bangkok, Thailand. Bangkok will be the moment to move from argument to commitment. The Trailblazer for Africa Award will also return, recognising individuals whose leadership has materially advanced the continent’s transformation. If Washington demonstrated what African leadership sounds like when it speaks with clarity and conviction, Bangkok must demonstrate what the international system looks like when it responds in earnest. Those who want to be part of that conversation can register their interest here.
**Culled from May Edition of PAV Magazine. Bruno Ittia is Director of Communications and Strategic Initiatives Denis and Lenora Foretia Foundation
