Earlier in the week, African Development Bank (AfDB) Group President Donald Kaberuka met with Bill Gates, Co-Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, USA to discuss new ways to collaborate and further facilitate the development of the African region.
Both institutions, historically, have committed resources of the order of billions of dollars to the continent. In recent times, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has committed some $2 billion to agricultural development primarily in sub-Saharan Africa, working with small holder farmers to increase farm productivity, foster sustainable agricultural practices, and achieve greater impact with other stakeholders including the private sector, donors and the respective governments.
The AfDB, in its own right, is Africa’s Bank, and has maintained its commitment to the development of the continent as its premier development finance organization. As the bank marks its golden jubilee in three weeks, it has amassed an impressive shareholder base comprising 53 African and 26 non-African member countries, with an authorization capital of about $103.53 billion, according to its website.
The bank’s commitment to developing Africa could not be better stated than with the provision of about 4,003 loans and grants valued at $104 billion in the past 46 years of its existence. Infrastructure till date has gulped some 50% of the funds from the bank while the agricultural, rural development, finance and environment sectors also feature prominently on the list of benefitting sectors.
According to a statement on the bank’s website, Kabureka and Gates discussed issues ranging from vaccine delivery to sanitation and onto education and financial inclusion, not leaving out, of course, Ebola.
Another major theme of their discussions was the issue of effective data gathering which is a key focus for both organizations. “Whether it is health, education, or the kinds of things we do at the bank, we have an issue with data,” said President Kaberuka.
Just last week, the AfDB chief delivered a keynote address at the “Delivering on the Data Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa” event at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC where he said; “Our ability to make progress going forward will depend on our ability to measure what we do. The quality of our policies will be that much more effective if informed by solid reliable data.” At the event, he revealed that the bank had contributed about $100 million to its regional member countries (RMCs) aimed at building better statistical capacities.
Concluding the visit, the President gave a talk to an audience comprising employees of the foundation. A mutual interest of both institutions is an improved disease surveillance system, over which key officials from the bank shared ideas with top executives at the foundation bordering on the deployment of such systems across the continent.
“One of the reasons I’m here to talk to the Foundation is to see how we can use these new technologies, It’s something you do extraordinarily well. As Bill and I were discussing this morning, in a world of increasingly scarce public resources, but plenty of private resources, how do we combine them to maximize both?” he concluded.
By Emmanuel Iruobe
