African Development Bank (AfDB)

Performance evidence

Overview

MOPAN released its most recent assessment of AfDB in 2023.

The African Development Bank (AfDB) is Africa’s largest regional multilateral development finance institution. Founded in 1963, its mandate is “to contribute to the sustainable economic development and social progress of its regional member countries both individually and jointly.” Its broad goal is to spur sustainable economic development and social progress in its regional member countries, thus contributing to poverty reduction. The African Development Bank Group comprises three constitutional institutions: the African Development Bank (AfDB); the African Development Fund (ADF), which was founded with specific legal status in 1972 to establish a concessional window for low-income countries, and the Nigeria Trust Fund (NTF), which was founded in 1976 with the Nigerian government.

Performance rating summary

AFDB 2022 organisational performance wheel — Organisational performance

Key findings

The Bank has demonstrated dynamism and made clear commitments to major reforms to further strengthen its fitness-for-purpose. Implementation is going in a positive direction. For example, thanks to decentralisation efforts, more than 75% of projects are managed from regional hubs/country offices, and partnership and policy dialogue with RMCs is stronger.
The Bank has demonstrated its ability to respond swiftly and with agility to emergency situations during the COVID-19 crisis.
The Bank enjoys a privileged relationship with African governments and prides itself on being the partner of choice and a trusted advisor. This translates into a deeper understanding of needs and leadership opportunities at the country level with other partners, as exemplified in the strong relevance of the Bank’s portfolio.
Over the past five years, the Bank has made the delivery of results more central to its development efforts and has revamped institutional arrangements for quality improvements. As part of its results-based management (RBM) pillars, evaluation has gained in credibility and new quality assurance instruments have been added.
The Bank has become a key actor in mobilising private investors, especially for infrastructure finance, and aims to foster greater private sector engagement through the African Investment Forum (AIF).
The Bank’s commitment to transparency is demonstrated by its first place in the Aid Transparency Index ranking of 50 global development institutions for SOs.

Improvements are still needed to ensure strategic coherence (TYS, High 5s, sectoral categorisation) and a rigorous analysis of the Bank’s comparative advantage. This could help the Bank to remain selective in line with core strengths while being responsive to clients’ needs.
Some DBDM reforms remain works in progress requiring consolidation. This includes further clarifying roles and responsibility between the countries and the sectors and reaching country presence targets. Despite recent progress, staff numbers and financial capacity remain constraints on reaching the required level of support to operations.
Delays in implementation and disbursements reflect general problems with quality-at-entry reviews, unrealistic planning and targets, over-rated implementation capacity and procurement delays. This is particularly the case for complex projects and those in fragile contexts. There is scope for improvement of the quality and timeliness of reporting tools (IPRs/ASRs/PSRs). Stronger accountability is also needed to pursue corrective action and facilitate projects/Country Strategy Papers (CSPs) restructuring opportunities as needed through mid-term review (MTR), CSP evaluations and country portfolio performance reviews (CPPRs).
The design of new interventions does not systematically apply lessons learned from independent evaluations and validations of projects. Also, improvements are still needed to implement internal audit recommendations and IDEV recommendations.
Further progress is needed on protection against SEA and SH. This includes resourcing and monitoring the implementation of the Bank’s PSEAH commitments, establishing and prioritising a victim/survivor-centred approach, and ensuring reporting at the Bank’s Governing Board. More systematic action should be taken to identify and monitor the risk of SEA and to ensure that intervention designs examine potential measures to prevent sexual abuses.
The Bank can improve the efficiency of partnerships to better allocate resources across the partnership system by leveraging resources particularly from counterpart funds and co-financing and by ensuring a fully operational information system to provide detailed reporting on partnerships.