Amid rising concerns over instability across Africa and its impact on development efforts, the President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), Dr Akinwumi Adesina, has made a call to action on prioritising investment decisions that focus on peace-building in making a transition from policy dialogue to investment.

According to Adesina, at the Africa Resilience Forum, peace and security in Africa must be an aim of investment decisions aimed at exploring ways to strengthen the resilience of the continent’s people and states.

Speaking on the year’s forum theme ‘Financing Security, Peace and Development for a Resilient Africa’, Adesina said reversing the current trends and establishing an alliance of partners to adopt a new investment approach that favours peace would change the development-peace-security paradigm on the continent.

“The Africa Resilience Forum is a call to action to work together and make a transition from policy dialogue to investment, and then from investment to impact and the institution has a strategy for addressing fragility, building resilience in Africa, the aim of which is to bring an end to, in particular, the ‘triangle of disaster’ – rural poverty, youth unemployment and environmental degradation,” he said.

AfDB Group’s Vice President for Regional Development, Integration and Business Delivery, Marie-Laure Akin-Olugbade, emphasized that violence can be eliminated by adopting peace-based actions, noting that the bank was the first development finance institution (DFI) to incorporate the issues of peace and fragility into its programmes.

She added that there is a need for innovative approaches to financing peace, security and development in African countries that find themselves in situations of fragility, sometimes driven by conflict which can be achieved through governments, the private sector, civil society and development partners cooperating closely.

The bank revealed its partnership with the African Union and the continent’s Regional Economic Communities to develop Security-Indexed Investment Bonds (SIIBs), which will require a minimum of $5 billion by 2030 as SIIBs offer a holistic investment strategy that combines peace-building and development expertise to offset the fiscal implications of high-security sector spending.

On her part, the Deputy Assistant Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Africa Bureau, Noura Hamladji, said a coordinated approach should be taken to addressing humanitarian, developmental, peace and security needs.

“Development aid, aid for income-generating activities for communities affected by conflict, and the establishment of basic social infrastructure (schools, health centres, water and sanitation) are just as valid as humanitarian action, we need massive investment in countries in conflict,” she said.