Samaila Zubairu, president and chief executive officer of the Africa Finance Corporation AFC has reasons to be proud of the multilateral financial institution's progress. One of the key development institutions on the continent, AFC is building the muscle that it needs to take on the challenge of financing Africa's progress.
"We achieved the billion-dollar revenue mark for the first time last year. We also achieved 400m of total comprehensive income. We saw 18 growth or so to our bottom line." Additionally, its subsidiary, AFC Capital Partners, has just achieved a first close of 398m with the Infrastructure Climate Resilience Fund - more grist for AFC's frenetic mill.
AFC's over-arching mission, as Zubairu explains, is to support the transformation of African economies, which are mainly driven by raw material exports, to focus on local value addition and capture. That way, he says, lies job and wealth creation, which the continent sorely needs. A major impediment to that outcome is the difficulty of access to capital - and, Zubairu says, AFC is deploying its own favourable ratings in service of making capital much more accessible to African countries and entrepreneurs.
"Access to capital is a challenge for the continent, so we use our credit ratings to make enhancements for African issuers in a way that they can better access the capital market at a more affordable cost."
The bank itself, he adds, wants to be "leading or co-developing important projects that de-risk opportunities and create bankable projects," such as Nigeria's Dangote Refinery, expected to reduce fuel imports to the region's largest economy. It's a project in which AFC, alongside other African development and commercial banks, is playing a key role.