The African Development Bank has chosen the Mauritanian economist Sidi Ould Tah as its president-elect after three rounds of voting on Thursday afternoon.
The election took place in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, at the end of the annual meeting of the continent’s biggest multilateral lender.
Tah, former head of the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (Badea), beat his closest challenger, Samuel Maimbo, of Zambia, a vice-president of the World Bank, to emerge as successor to the incumbent Akinwunmi Adesina, who completes his second five-year term in September.
Of the five candidates running, four men and a woman, Tah secured 76% of the total vote. Of the remaining votes, Maimbo won 20%, with the former Senegalese economy minister Amadou Hott gaining 3.5%.
The president-elect will be the ninth chief of the 60-year-old development finance institution, which boasts a broad ownership structure: 54 African countries are shareholders, as are G7 nations, including the US and Japan. Nigeria is its single biggest shareholder.
The bank is responsible for backing several large-scale infrastructure developments within the continent, in part using resources from the African Development Fund (ADF). International partners replenish the ADF’s resources every three years, with the next round of funding due to begin this November.
However, with the Trump administration committed to cutting US funding to the AfDB by $555m (£411m) to focus on domestic matters, the bank will have to find creative ways of doing more with less or finding new donors. Adesina has said the current capital of the AfDB has grown to $318bn.
Tah has pledged to collaborate more with Gulf states around infrastructure development.
