The idea that shavings of public gold sprinkled like fairy dust on private investment projects would bring to life a giant array of infrastructure and services which in turn would gift us wondrous progress in development hasn’t worked out. It is time to drop the fantasy and focus instead on the test...

The “billions to trillions” vision advanced the notion that some significant part of official development assistance (ODA) should be used to catalyze additional finance from other public and private sources. Seven years later, the expectations that blended finance would expand sharply to help narrow...

While Fitch had lowered Ghana’s rating in January, S&P opted to maintain its B-rating with a stable outlook pointing to Ghana’s solid growth prospects over the coming years. These divergent actions—and strong market reactions—are a reminder of the tremendous weight that investors put into assess...

Despite the announcement of the “billions to trillions” vision over six years ago—there is no upward trend in the overall volume of public-private financing for infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa. The EU is region best placed to help change this. 

Much has been written about yawning infrastructure finance gaps in sub-Saharan Africa, and there is a growing recognition that these gaps have widened during the pandemic. Since the “billions to trillions” vision was launched in 2015, many have stressed that the private sector must be a significant ...

For those who care about the mobilization of private finance for development, channeling a much larger volume and share of the trillions of dollars of global institutional investment, including from pension funds, into SDG-related investment in emerging markets might be described as the holy grail. ...

Despite criticism of the “Billions to Trillions” action plan, we know that catalyzing much larger volumes of private finance for investments related to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) remains the only viable avenue for achieving the scale needed in developing countries, given very real cons...

Africa’s informal sector remains the largest in the world. According to the International Labor Organization, it claims almost 90 percent of the economy in sub-Saharan Africa and about two-thirds in North Africa (although there is significant heterogeneity in its size across countries).

CGD’s Mikaela Gavas joins Gyude to discuss barriers to private investment in health and infrastructure projects and how a new initiative—an Accelerator Hub—could help local businesses and institutions in Africa develop financially viable proposals and connect them with investors.