The African Development Bank (AfDB) invested $2.9 billion in Angola over the decade to 2025, its resident representative said at the launch of the bank’s Development Effectiveness Review for Angola 2016–2025, describing the deployment as representing exponential growth in the institution’s engagement with the country.
Pietro Toigo, AfDB Resident Representative in Angola, said the investments “demonstrate how the multilateral system — and the AfDB in particular — can constitute a viable financing solution to support the economic diversification strategy that Angola has been implementing.”
He said the support had “materialised across strategic sectors including energy, agriculture, water and sanitation, governance, youth and entrepreneurship, innovation and private-sector development,” speaking at the ceremony marking the publication of the decade-long review.
Angola’s Secretary of State for Planning, Luís Epalanga, underscored the significance of both the report and the partnership with the AfDB, detailing concrete outcomes: over the ten-year period, 1.3 million people gained access to electricity, approximately 550,000 people obtained improved access to water, and nearly 30,000 people benefited from better sanitation conditions.
In the agricultural sector, around 50,000 farmers adopted more productive technologies that are also resilient to climate change, “contributing to increased productive capacity, food security and improved incomes for rural households,” the minister said.
Epalanga added that the AfDB partnership had also helped strengthen state capacity and foster a more conducive institutional environment for economic transformation.
Toigo said the report offered an opportunity to take stock of the work carried out over the period under review.
“It is also a celebration of a partnership with Angola that continues to grow and deepen,” he noted, adding that more important than the volume of financing mobilised and amounts disbursed “are the results achieved.”
He highlighted that investments made between 2016 and 2025 had translated into families with greater access to water, energy and sanitation, vulnerable girls benefiting from scholarships, and farmers gaining access to new technologies and financing.
Toigo also expressed the AfDB’s intention to continue improving implementation agility — specifically by reducing the time between project approval and first disbursement, accelerating procurement processes and strengthening the institution’s capacity to measure and communicate results.
The AfDB representative acknowledged the need to “accelerate investment in Angola’s private sector,” conceding that the bank’s direct investment in that segment “has remained relatively limited, for various structural and regulatory reasons.”
He recalled that in July the AfDB approved its first investment in Angola’s non-financial private sector, and disclosed that the institution holds a pipeline of private-sector projects under preparation worth more than $1 billion — equivalent to approximately €866 million — with potential for approval within the next two years.
The Development Effectiveness Review covers the full span of the AfDB’s operational engagement with Angola from 2016 to 2025 and is intended to serve as a reference document for planning the next phase of the bilateral cooperation programme.
Angola has been pursuing a structured economic diversification agenda since the end of the oil-price downturn of the mid-2010s, seeking to reduce dependence on crude revenues by building out capacity in agriculture, manufacturing, infrastructure and financial services.
The AfDB’s growing pipeline signals increasing confidence in Angola’s reform trajectory, as the bank moves beyond sovereign lending into direct private-sector financing — a shift that Toigo indicated the institution is committed to deepening in the coming years.
Source: Notícias ao Minuto / Original article: https://www.noticiasaominuto.com/economia/3052398/bad-investiu-2-5-mil-milhoes-para-o-desenvolvimento-de-angola#utm_source=rss-economia&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssfeed
