On the heels of last year’s landmark $93 billion replenishment of the World Bank’s IDA—and with the international community preoccupied with responding to Ukraine—the replenishment of the African Development Fund cannot be an afterthought.

The World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings take place this week, bringing leaders from around the world to Washington. CGD’s experts take you through what they’re paying attention to.

The “billions to trillions” vision advanced the notion that some significant part of official development assistance (ODA) should be used to catalyze additional finance from other public and private sources. Seven years later, the expectations that blended finance would expand sharply to help narrow...

As we watch with horror and outrage the human toll of Russia’s invasion, we must also anticipate the financial and economic toll and think about what role the international financial institutions (IFIs) can play in alleviating it.

Despite the announcement of the “billions to trillions” vision over six years ago—there is no upward trend in the overall volume of public-private financing for infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa. The EU is region best placed to help change this. 

Much has been written about yawning infrastructure finance gaps in sub-Saharan Africa, and there is a growing recognition that these gaps have widened during the pandemic. Since the “billions to trillions” vision was launched in 2015, many have stressed that the private sector must be a significant ...

For those who care about the mobilization of private finance for development, channeling a much larger volume and share of the trillions of dollars of global institutional investment, including from pension funds, into SDG-related investment in emerging markets might be described as the holy grail. ...