Areas of action

The report builds on the Foundation’s 2025 Facts & Figures: Financing The Africa We Want, released in the lead up to the 2025 IGW, with updated data and expert contributions. While the earlier document provided a diagnostic overview of Africa’s financing landscape and untapped potential, this final version consolidates new insights and takeaways from the event. Financing The Africa We Want includes the collective voice of IGW participants – from African government institutions and business leaders to youth representatives, civil society actors, academics, and international partners.

• Sustainable Finance

The Mo Ibrahim Foundation's latest report, Financing Africa: where is the money? provides a comprehensive analysis of both the financial needs deemed necessary for Africa to meet its development and climate goals and the resources that are currently available.

• Sustainable Finance

Africa’s position on the reforms of the global financial architecture is predominantly constrained by a lack of affordable, reliable, and sufficient finance, juxtaposed with a debt crisis in certain nations, and compounded by extreme vulnerability to climate change. Rather than allocating increased funds to adaptation efforts, the majority of funds are directed towards mitigation, which is most profitable for financiers and lenders. Finance for mitigation is more than ten times the $56b (8.4%) available for adaptation in 2020. Addressing Africa’s substantial financing requirements for resilient growth demands a complete re-evaluation of development finance strategies, coupled with innovative enhancements in financial instruments and mechanisms. This paper draws on a series of policy and reform proposals from African leaders. It builds on initiatives emerging from the Global South and puts forward a set of recommendations, reflecting Africa’s priorities in advancing equitable reform of the international financial architecture.

• Sustainable Finance

The report also assesses Africa’s representativeness in the current multilateral architecture, which is still beyond inadequate –a central point in the 2023 Ibrahim Governance Weekend (IGW) high-level discussions, which took place in Nairobi(28-30 April). This was our first ever in-person event since COVID-19 hit the continent, and it was truly a unique convening of the greatest African minds to chart together the path to our continent’s bright future.

• Ibrahim Governance Weekend

The report is based on insights drawn from the 2022 IIAG dataset and highlights a positive correlation between access to high-quality statistics and effective governance across African countries from 2012 to 2021. The report emphasises the importance of data for governance, identifies key data gaps that affect the measurement of governance and development in Africa, and proposes solutions to bridge these gaps, including investment in data. It also features expert contributions and opinions from IIAG data sources and key partners.

• #AUEUTracker