In May 2025, the African Development Bank (AfDB) will mark its 60th anniversary under the theme “Making Africa’s capital work better for Africa’s Development.” The celebration coincides with the gathering of the AfDB’s shareholders, back donors, and stakeholders at its annual assembly in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire from 26-30 May. However, African women and their communities are asking critical questions of the bank. Does the AfDB’s capitalist framework of loans and so-called development projects promote “better” lives and livelihoods for all? After 60 years, can we really say the AfDB has benefitted the African continent and its peoples? What does the AfDB have to celebrate in truth?
What is the AfDB celebrating?
The AfDB’s African Development Fund, which includes 27 non-regional members and through which African countries take out loans, often at market rates, will also honour its 51st year. A new AfDB president will be elected to replace outgoing, Akinwumi Adesina. The AfDB may be on the cusp of a major milestone, however the hardships and difficult living conditions of thousands of African women, their communities, and the ongoing degradation and financialisation of nature that the bank has pushed for years tell another story.
During its six decades of existence, the financing, and operations of the AfDB are said to have reached over 400 million Africans. While it is true that the AfDB has considerably expanded its portfolio and funding, becoming a major multilateral financing institution on the continent, it is equally true that its neoliberal model has contributed to serious socio-economic and environmental conditions.
These self-lauded ‘successes’ hide a distressing truth that the AfDB funding has contributed to the impoverishment of many communities on the continent, with women being at the frontline. Communities are losing access to the natural resources on which they depend for survival:
“The [Nachtigal] project has [contributed to] the infertility of the soil, that’s our biggest challenge. …We used to produce potatoes and yams but currently no potatoes grow and when they do, they are small. Without food, life is not easy because even eating is a problem now for most families. You can’t make ends meet.” – Bella Marie Victorine, community activist, Cameroon
The loss of farmland, rivers, forests, and sacred sites is destroying the socio-economic and cultural organisations that have governed the life of these communities for centuries. Women are hardest hit as social reproducers and farmers in their communities. “As far as I am concerned, the dam has made us poorer,” said another community woman impacted by the Nachtigal project. “We are starving because the water is flooding the fields, the cassava is rotting, the yams are rotting. We are truly dead.”
It is vital that those who bear the brunt of this destructive development model speak for themselves. They are carrying the real costs of maldevelopment, yet their voices are too often silenced in favour of catering to the interests of multinational corporations, big private lenders, and political and economic elites on the continent and beyond.
Who really benefits from the AfDB funding – and who bears the cost?
The neoliberal development model of the AfDB and the policies that stem from it offer economic opportunities that primarily tend to serve the interests of multinationals by guaranteeing them a deregulated business environment with reduced (or eliminated) taxes and duties. The AfDB implements strategies aimed at ‘encouraging’ African governments to lift trade barriers and relax their regulations to enable the private sector to make large profits, as is the case with The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
In most sites where projects financed by the AfDB occur, women and communities are experiencing profound social upheavals due to the degradation of nature, grabbing of natural resources and, above all, a loss of their means of subsistence. In Gabon, for example, the Grain project financed by the AfDB and whose model is based on the Public Private Partnership (PPP), has led to the creation of a joint venture between the multinational OLAM International and the state. This hybrid entity has contributed to destroying the capacity of communities to safeguard their wellbeing and that of their families. It’s also placed women and their community at risk, often leading to serious violations of their rights.
“The river that crosses the village has been contaminated by the Grain factory’s wastewater. The communities no longer use the river or fish in it.” – Community member, Adola, Gabon
“The arrival of the Grain project in the Adola Department and the planting of the factory in our locality has created a lot of bad things, a lot of wrongs”, said a community woman during the AfDB political education school hosted by JVE-Cote d’Ivoire and facilitated by WoMin last September in Abidjan. Many participants pointed out that under the pretext of ‘development,’ multinationals, with the complicity of their financiers and the local governments, commit abuses that remain largely invisible and for which they are not sufficiently held accountable.
AfDB – a tool for transformation and collective prosperity or perpetual neocolonial economic domination?
While the AfDB was established in Khartoum, Sudan in 1963 by 23 newly independent African nations, it bears a complex colonial legacy. Its policies and funding strengthen and perpetuate neocolonial economic domination of the continent, with disastrous consequences for women and nature.
Rather than implementing emancipatory reforms and policies for Africa—which could radically decolonise and transform our economies, decarbonise and democratise our energy sectors, and carve out a truly African development model unfettered by Western extractive and capitalist ideology—the AfDB continues a harmful path. It perpetuates the poisoned legacy of polluting and plundering the continent. This is done in collusion with Global North countries, emerging powers in the Global South, multinational corporations, and financial institutions.
Sixty years after its creation, what assessment can African women and communities who have lost hope and dignity make of the role of the Bank on the continent? What does the Pan African resistance against the extractive development model financed by the AfDB in Africa look like? What bridges and solidarity can we build as activists, social movements, and women from communities in resistance to denounce and demand reparations from the African Development Bank in Africa and beyond?
Shaping development for ourselves – building an AfDB Counter Space
For those, whose lives are threatened by the maldevelopment model financed by the AfDB, enough is enough! African women and their communities, NGO groups and social movements from across the continent and beyond will gather from 21-23 May in Abidjan, ahead of the AfDB’s official assemblies. They will host their own convening to amplify the voices of women and communities who are on the frontline of resistance against the AfDB’s development vision. They aim to shake up and shift the mainstream neoliberal development narrative and create space to strengthen solidarity and resistance to AfDB’s continued support for maldevelopment in African communities.
They are calling for a development bank that serves the interests of all Africans. One that guarantees a better quality of life and fosters true development and prosperity for all. The AfDB Counter Space will be a critical moment for women and communities to identify and define the development alternatives they want for themselves and for future generations.
