Lesotho hosted the CEO Forum of African Development Finance Institutions under the theme “Resilient Development Finance Institutions, Stronger Economies in Governance, Standards, Regulation and Development Impact.” The three-day meeting gathered the leaders of institutions committed to advancing the economic transformation of the African continent, placing institutional standards and regulatory strength at the centre of the agenda.
For the host institution, the theme spoke directly to the accountability questions confronting the continent’s development lenders. Thabo Khasipe, chief executive of the Lesotho National Development Centre, described the subject as timely and important for African development finance institutions to reflect on the question of resilience. Speaking at the forum, he also drew attention to the burden carried by African economies, noting that the cost of capital is prohibitively high for the continent. His remarks placed the pricing of finance, and the institutional conditions that shape it, squarely within the forum’s core mandate.
A complementary critique came from expert Rab Arshad, who argued that trillions of dollars are mostly sitting idle and disconnected from the real productive economy. In Arshad’s assessment, the challenge is not the mobilisation of capital but rather that of minds: ensuring that policymakers, regulators and the financing industry understand the benefits of appreciating what is happening in the future rather than the past. His framing directed attention away from resource constraints and toward the regulatory and policy decisions that determine whether available capital is put to productive use, a concern squarely within the remit of the office-holders and supervisors present.
Meanwhile, institutional cooperation produced a concrete outcome. As a sign of further strengthening collaboration, the Lesotho National Development Centre and the Industrial Development of South Africa signed a Memorandum of Understanding between the two institutions. The agreement is aimed at joint work on mega projects of mutual interest, among other forms of cooperation, formalising a relationship between two national development institutions operating within their respective mandates.
Reporting on the forum is available at https://www.sabcnews.com/sabcnews/lesotho-holds-ceo-forum-of-african-development-finance-institutions/
Taken together, the forum’s discussions suggested that the continent’s development finance community sees governance and standards, rather than capital alone, as the decisive variables. The theme adopted for the gathering, with its explicit reference to governance, standards, regulation and development impact, signalled that the institutions represented measure their performance not only by the volume of finance they deploy but by the regulatory frameworks and institutional resilience that underpin it. With a bilateral memorandum now in place between Maseru’s national development centre and South Africa’s industrial development institution, and with sector leaders having spent three days confronting questions of resilience and the idle trillions disconnected from productive use, the forum closed with its central accountability question still on the table: whether policymakers, regulators and financiers can align their decisions with the future the sector says it is trying to build.