AfDB – non-sovereign
- Score:
- 51.4
- Position:
- 2 / 21
Overview
The African Development Bank (AfDB) promotes regional cooperation and unity across the African region. Its non-sovereign portfolio provides non-concessional and concessional loans, equity investments, loan guarantees, and technical assistance to lower and middle-income governments and the private sector. AfDB was established in 1964.
Analysis
AfDB came second in the non-sovereign assessment with 51.4 out of 100. It is a publisher to the IATI Standard and has a free, bulk export available for its investment database. AfDB performed well for the Core Information and Impact Management components, coming first for both. However, its score was lowered by its performance in the other components.
AfDB’s non-sovereign portfolio came top in the Core Information component, with 15.83 out of 20. AfDB scored for sixteen of the seventeen indicators, only failing to score for domicile. It scored 100% for ten of these indicators because it publishes to IATI and provides data in a free, bulk export file.
AfDB also came top in the Impact Management component with a score of 17.75 out of 25. It scored for all organisation-level indicators. AfDB was the only non-sovereign DFI to score 100% for activity indicators/metrics. It was also only one of two to score for the results indicator by disclosing the targets. It did not score for baseline data, actual results, and additionality statement however.
AfDB came seventh in the ESG and Accountability to Communities component with 14.5 out of 30. It scored for all organisation-level indicators apart from project-level grievance mechanism (PGM) community disclosure policy. It was one of only three non-sovereign DFIs to score for the independent accountability mechanism (IAM) community disclosure policy. However, it was one of two not to have a free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) policy. At the project level, it was the only non-sovereign DFI to score for disclosing the minimum E&S documentation and one of two to score for the beneficial ownership indicator, disclosing main shareholders of companies. However, it did not score for most of the other project-level indicators, including summary of E&S risks, dropping many points.
AfDB came eighth in the Financial Information component, with a score of 1.19 out of 15. It was one of three non-sovereign DFIs to score for share of equity. It also scored points for the financial reports/statements indicator. However, it did not score at all for the remaining five indicators of the component.
AfDB scored 2.08 out of 10 in the Financial Intermediary (FI) Sub-investments component, coming sixth. It only scored for the FI (bank) use of funds indicator.
Recommendations
- AfDB should include E&S risk category in its bulk download file to improve its score for format of publication.
- It should publish data points that are already disclosed on its data portal to the IATI Standard, including client description.
- AfDB should disclose other Core Information indicators including disbursement, client contact, and date of activity disclosure. It should consistently disclose domicile and total investment cost.
- AfDB should review the exceptions articles in its access to information policy and include an objective harm test for confidentiality of information provided by third parties.
- It should disclose baseline data and actual results and an additionality statement for all projects.
- AfDB should publish summaries of E&S risks and all E&S documentation for its investments.
- It should adopt an FPIC policy and create a policy guiding the disclosure of the presence of the PGM at community level.
- It should provide assurance of community disclosure for investments when disclosure is required.
- It should publish currency of investment and consistently publish data for repeat investment, co-financing, concessionality, mobilisation, loan tenor, and length of guarantee indicators.
- AfDB should create policies for FI sub-investment disclosure and then disclose sub-investments in line with Publish What You Fund’s DFI Transparency Tool.