The African Development Bank (AfDB) is entering the future with a new generation of leadership as it selects its incoming president, Dr Sidi Ould Tah.
The veteran Mauritanian-born economist will replace Nigeria’s Dr Akinwumi Adesina when his second term expires later this year. The leadership handover is a key milestone for the pan-African development Bank as it seeks to pursue a new vision of continental reach.
Dr Tah’s election was formally approved at the AfDB annual meetings in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, where the Bank Board of Governors, finance ministers, and central bank governors of its 81 members elected him to office. As the Bank’s ninth president, he will assume office on September 1, 2025.
At the end of a career spanning three decades working on economic policy and development finance, Dr Tah is widely admired for delivering results. Due to his leadership, while he was the Director-General of the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (BADEA). His leadership was responsible for driving the expansion rate of its activities. During his tenure, the capital of the BADEA rose from four billion to nearly seven billion dollars. Of interest, the bank initiated over 700 projects aimed at development in 44 African nations, most of which within three years.
An explicit focus on tangible outputs and institutional performance also marked his approach to BADEA. Rather than making promises regarding discrete pilot schemes, Tah cultivated high-impact, high-fee undertakings with multi-country reach and quantifiable outcomes. These principles of operational discipline and strategic vision are two of the competencies he now brings to the AfDB.
As part of his policy agenda, Dr Tah outlined that leveraging new funding sources must scale up the AfDB’s capacity to fund. He is to utilize callable capital, mobilize co-financing from the private sector, and apply structured financial instruments specifically designed to respond to the needs of emerging African countries. He believes development must translate from vision to action, projects that scale, deliver, and lift entire regions.
Institutional integrity is one field in which Dr Tah would like to leave his mark. He has promised to maintain internal governance and transparency at the AfDB to deepen stakeholder, partner, and investor trust. In his view, institutions live or perish based on how much they trust, and he would prefer professionalism, accountability, and integrity-based good governance to be the foundations on which Bank operations are based.
Dr Tah brings into perspective a vision for AfDB presidency that is universally applicable. He has consistently emphasized partnerships that do not rely on traditional aid models but coalesce capital and collective objectives. He sees an AfDB that will be in a position to be heard credibly in financial capitals of Nairobi, Beijing, and Riyadh, forging alliances that will serve Africa for generations to come for industrial development and infrastructure.
As a well-known pan-African development leader, Dr Tah’s qualification involves mobilizing over $50 billion of capital into various projects, bringing solar electricity to hundreds of villages, and seeding tens of thousands of jobs through small and medium enterprise development. He was also instrumental in guiding the Arab-Africa Financial Consortium as an instrument to deepen financial cooperation among Arab partners and African countries.
The same week, there was a change of leadership at AfDB, and the same week, Nigeria’s Central Bank Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Olayemi Cardoso, was awarded the Central Bank Governor of the Year by African Banker magazine. It valued his strategic efforts towards Nigeria’s economic stabilization through monetary reforms, exchange rate transparency, and policy credibility.
Together, these developments bring a new vision and leadership to African finance. At the AfDB under Dr Tah, everyone looks forward to a new era of aggressive growth, institutional renewal, and strategic investment for Africa.
