The African Development Bank Group will arrive at the Africa Financial Summit (AFIS) 2026 in Luanda with one central question on its agenda: how to turn Africa’s own capital into working finance for projects on the ground. The summit runs on 3 and 4 November 2026 in Angola’s capital, and the Bank Group will attend as a Main Partner, with a delegation led by Bank Group President Dr Sidi Ould Tah.
At the centre of the Bank’s participation sits the New African Financial Architecture for Development (NAFAD) initiative, which aims to mobilise the continent’s domestic capital to help close an estimated $400 billion annual development financing gap. Dr Tah will deliver a keynote address setting out how NAFAD can bridge that gap by unlocking and deploying African capital at scale.
The practical mechanics get their own session. Under the heading “Making NAFAD Work for Africa’s Real Economy”, the Bank will convene an AFIS side event built specifically around implementation. The dialogue is designed to move beyond strategy and examine execution: how governments, development finance institutions, commercial banks, institutional investors and private-sector partners can work together to mobilise capital, strengthen project preparation, de-risk investments and accelerate project delivery across the continent.
Meanwhile, the side event builds on the summit’s wider strategic discussions, and it reflects the Bank’s emphasis on whether financial commitments translate into functioning projects. Strengthening project preparation and de-risking investments are the operational bottlenecks the session will address directly, with the goal of shortening the distance between financing and delivery.
A second high-level engagement looks at the architecture behind that delivery. In the Leaders Roundtable “Game Changers | Capital Architecture: A New Age for African Finance”, the Bank will join a discussion bringing together leading architects of NAFAD. The session will examine the role of guarantees, first-loss instruments and risk-sharing mechanisms in transforming Africa’s financial architecture into deployable capital, while expanding local-currency financing options. The framing is deliberately practical: instruments only matter if they make capital usable for projects, and local-currency options are part of making that deployment work in African economies.
The summit itself, hosted by the Government of Angola and co-hosted by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), will take up the question of what growth model comes next for African finance, and whether the industry can turn financial strength into economic power. Jeune Afrique Media Group is the founder of the AFIS Annual Summit.
For the Bank Group, the Luanda gathering is a chance to position NAFAD as an operating framework rather than a concept. The keynote, the roundtable and the side event form a sequence that runs from vision to structure to execution, each stage anchored in the same question: how African capital can be mobilised, structured and delivered at the scale the continent’s financing gap demands.
The $400 billion annual gap remains the measure against which that delivery will be judged. The Bank’s argument at AFIS 2026 is that the resources to narrow it exist within Africa, and that the task now is to build the guarantees, risk-sharing tools, local-currency channels and project preparation capacity needed to put them to work. Whether governments, lenders and investors can align around that task is the outcome the summit’s sessions will test, and the standard by which NAFAD’s promise will ultimately be measured.