Afdb Candidate Amadou Hott: Bank Must Do More With Less

In May the African Development Bank AfDB board of governors will elect a new president to fill the big boots of the evangelical Akinwumi Adesina, whose second and final five-year term ends in September. Adesina leaves the Bank with much more firepower, but he also leaves at a time of great global political and economic upheaval. This new geopolitical reality dispenses with all the assumptions that attended the post-war settlement that has ordered global affairs for the last 80 years. This will undoubtedly have repercussions for Africa and its native institutions, including the AfDB.

Among the candidates to lead the Bank into this uncertain future is Amadou Hott, a former vice president of the Bank for power, energy, green growth, and climate change and minister of economy, planning, and international cooperation in his native Senegal, where he guided the country through the pandemic. Hott's ambitions sit well within this context he argues in a conversation with African Business that the continent needs to wake up to the fact that support from its international partners will be less forthcoming. "They have their troubles," he notes, citing the United Kingdom's recent decision to boost defence spending while cutting official development assistance ODA.

"Whatever money remains for development needs to be amplified - to do more with less."

Hott's view is that this opens the door for a greater role for the private sector. "That means leveraging capital markets, mobilising private sector investment, and strengthening domestic resource mobilisation, whether through government channels or local private sector initiatives."

And this, he says, is overdue. "This is something we should have done a long time ago, but it's crucial now. Otherwise, our impact will shrink."