Chief Executive Officer of leading consultancy firm, Africa At Work, Dianna Games, has backed former Agriculture Minister, Akinwumi Adesina, to reinvigorate the African Development Bank (AFDB). Commenting on Adeshina’s recent election as President of the AfDB, she argued that Adesina’s focus on agriculture puts him in good stead to perform well in his new role because the AfDB is currently concentrating on how to transform economies through innovation, improved policies, better domestic mobilisation of resources and improving the attractiveness of African assets. She described Adesina as a, “A modern leader with strong views on issues affecting Africa and ideas about how to transform development outcomes through intelligent risk-taking and new approaches to old problems.”
According to her, as Nigeria’s Agriculture Minister Adesina tried to reduce the country’s $11billion-a-year import bill for basic foodstuffs by looking at innovative funding mechanisms, tackling corruption and improving efficiency. She noted that although the AfDB’s immediate past President, Donald Kaberuka, took the institution to a different level, making it a truly pan-African institution and changing the perception of it being a bank more aligned with the needs of Francophone countries and West Africa than the whole continent, “the bank itself needs a makeover.”
“Despite the positive changes he has introduced, Kaberuka admits the AfDB remains a construct of the past, an institution that needs to change its own mindset about development and re-engineer its operations for the needs of 2015 and beyond,” she stated.
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