By Onu Okorie
Nigeria has been left out of a new African Development Bank Group initiative after the Board of Directors of the African Development Fund, the Bank Group’s concessional window, approved a grant of $4.23 million to implement the second phase of a project integrating natural capital into development financing across Africa.
The project covers thirteen countries — Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania, Togo, Zambia and Zimbabwe, none of which is Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy.
The initiative draws in-kind contributions from partner institutions including the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the German public agency for international cooperation on sustainable development (GIZ), the African Union Development Agency–New Partnership for Africa’s Development, the Economic Commission for Africa, and the United Nations Environment Programme. It aims to foster an environment conducive to better use of natural capital and its integration into political and financial decision-making. Participating countries will also contribute to the project themselves.
Implementation is scheduled to run from October 2026 to September 2029, with the project expected to produce outputs in policy, statistics, institutions and knowledge that support better integration of natural capital into development planning.
The strategy is designed to strengthen policy-making systems, statistical systems, institutional frameworks and knowledge-generation mechanisms needed by participating countries and the African Development Bank Group to assess natural capital and factor it into public policy. This will be pursued through an integrated set of measures, including policy support, technical assistance, assessments of statistical readiness, biodiversity financing tools, pilot projects to assess green wealth, capacity building and peer learning.
Innocent Onah, Chief Natural Resources Officer at the African Development Bank Group, said the project is intended to support development that is resilient to climate change, nature-friendly and inclusive by helping African countries better identify, measure and manage their natural wealth. He said it would also strengthen the evidence base informing development financing, sovereign policy dialogue and the mobilisation of green investments.
He added that, in the long term, the project could yield tangible improvements for target countries in GDP growth, foreign direct investment inflows, economic development, poverty reduction, employment, economic competitiveness, and financial and economic risk ratings.