Outgoing African Development Bank (AfDB) president, Dr Akinwumi Adesina, has highlighted the successes of the institution. His term of office ends on September 1.

The bank has maintained a AAA rating since 2015. It increased its capital raise from $93-billion in 2015 to $318-billion last year, which is the highest level achieved in the AfDB’s 60-year history. This year so far, it had issued $10-billion in long-term global benchmark bonds to finance African projects. Jointly with the Inter-American Development Bank, it had led the redirection of the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights to multilateral development banks (MDBs), allowing their use as hybrid capital to unlock funding that could be from four to eight times greater.

The AfDB had also issued the greatest amount of social bonds of any MDB, totalling $14-billion over eight years. It had provided 16 partial credit and partial risk guarantees with a total value of almost $3-billion, which has mobilised $5-billion for African development. And it has provided a $250-million partial credit guarantee to Egypt, helping that country to become the first in Africa to raise a Panda Bond on the Chinese capital market, with a value of $500-million.

“The [AfDB] is not just waiting for more capital, we are innovating to do more with the capital we have,” he pointed out. “Through our balance sheet optimisation initiatives, we are stretching every dollar of risk capital further. Our ambition is threefold: free up capital, crowd in investors and amplify development impact.”

Other AfDB achievements include the Africa Investment Forum, created in cooperation with strategic partners in 2018; this has mobilised more than $225-billion in “investment interest” across key development sectors, including agribusiness, energy, infrastructure and manufacturing. Further, the bank was the first MDB to provide a synthetic securitisation of a non-sovereign portfolio, which saw the transfer of the mezzanine risk of a private sector loan portfolio totalling $1-billion. Again, the AfDB was the first MDB to undertake a private sector hybrid capital transaction, which was valued at $750-million, and involved more than 275 investors, which took the book order to $5.1-billion – which is the largest book order yet achieved by the bank. The bank has also provided a “Room to Run” sovereign offering that led to about $2-billion in new sovereign lending headroom.

Adesina was delivering the keynote address at the Standard Chartered Africa Summit, in Lagos, Nigeria.