According to the director of the continent’s development bank, Akin Adesina, Africa needs $25 billion, faster debt restructurings, and more favourable financing terms for the Africa Development Fund to prevent a lost decade.

Adesina, the continent was suffering from “long fiscal COVID” and the world was not doing enough to support it in getting past the years of hardship brought on by the pandemic and interest rate spikes, which had forced many countries into default.

“The G20 Common Framework, which is the bilateral and multilateral path to do (debt restructuring), must work faster for Africa,” Adesina said in a speech on Friday at London’s Chatham House, adding: “We can’t afford to have a lost decade.”

He also demanded a $25 billion restocking of the African Development Fund, the African Development Bank’s concessional lending division that provides loans to economically disadvantaged nations. The most ever replenishment committed, at $8.9 billion, during the funding cycle spanning 2023 to 2025.

This week, Zambia became the first nation to complete a debt rework under the Common Framework, a framework created by the G20 to assist developing nations in renegotiating unsustainable debt with all creditors, including China, which has significantly increased its loans to developing nations over the previous ten years.

However, Zambia’s authorities and others have complained that the nearly four gruelling years it took were too long for the procedure. In addition, Adesina reported that 22 African nations are at significant risk of financial trouble and that debt servicing obligations will reach $74 billion this year, up from $17 billion in 2010. Ethiopia and Ghana are also in default.

“This is because concessional financing has declined,” he said, adding: “You can’t do development at commercial rates. We have to make sure that the global financing system delivers more for Africa and avoid economic divergences that are coming about because of slow economic recovery in Africa from COVID.”

Adesina subsequently to journalists that the Paris Club, the established consortium of mostly Western creditor countries, needed to be permanently enlarged and that the Common Framework needed to incorporate quicker credit committee formation.

“The Paris Club was all about concessional lenders. But the world has changed,” he said, adding that expanding it was important “because it will allow you to reach a faster dialogue and a resolution”.