We meet Sidi Ould Tah at the end of a successful week as the new president of the African Development Bank AfDB. During our conversation, he appeared relaxed and at ease in his new surroundings, putting paid to the notion that the softly spoken Mauritanian, who has tended to eschew the limelight, would struggle under the constant, public-facing spotlight that comes with his leadership of Africa's premier development institution.
Our meeting came when he had been in office for a shade over 100 days. He had good reason to feel pleased with how things are going - he and his team had just landed a record pledge of 11bn for the 17th replenishment of the African Development Fund ADF, the grant-making and concessional finance arm of the AfDB targeting low-income countries. This replenishment was unprecedented in many ways given the current global political and economic context. Nineteen new African countries made commitments, showing that Africans need to determine their own future.
All the prognosis before the ADF meeting in London in December was that donors were tightening belts and that the bank would do very well if it could persuade them to match the last replenishment, three years ago, when they raised 8.9bn.
