Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what the investment performance has been to the UK Government of its spending through the African Development Bank in the last three financial years.

The UK provides funding to the African Development Bank (AfDB) through a number of different channels. We are currently contributing to a General Capital Increase (GCI) that was agreed by shareholders in 2019. We also provide funding to the Bank's concessional financing arm, the African Development Fund (ADF), which supports the poorest 37 countries in Africa. In addition, at COP26, the Prime Minister announced that the UK is providing a Room to Run guarantee to the Bank that will enable it to provide up to $2 billion of additional financing over four years to support countries across Africa to tackle climate change.

In terms of performance, the UK and other shareholders secured from the Bank under seven reform objectives. As of May 2022, 79 percent of these were assessed as being on track. For the ADF, the UK and other donors secured 92 policy commitments from the Bank, 62 of which were due by the November 2021 Mid-Term Review. The Bank met 93 percent of these commitments despite the challenges posed by the pandemic in 2020. The ADF has scored an "A" (i.e. meeting expectations) in each Annual Review over the last three years, whilst the GCI has scored two "A"s and a "B" (i.e. moderately did not meet expectations) over the last three years.

The AfDB has also performed well in a number of recent external reviews. In 2020, an ICAI assessment of UK support to the AfDB rated the Bank's relevance and alignment with UK priorities as green and its effectiveness in delivering these as green/amber. ICAI found that the Bank was "highly cost effective relative to other comparable multilateral banks". Earlier this month, the AfDB came first in the 2022 Aid Transparency Index, via Publish What You Fund. And last year the AfDF was ranked 2nd out of 49 development organisations in the Centre for Global Development assessment based on the quality of its development assistance.