| Welcome to Next Africa, a twice-weekly newsletter on where the continent stands now — and where it's headed. Sign up here to have it delivered to your email. The next leader of the African Development Bank faces a formidable task: pivoting the continent's biggest multilateral lender away from its reliance on the US and Europe, and securing billions of dollars of funding from other sources. Akinwumi Adesina's successor as AfDB president will be elected at a meeting in Abidjan, Ivory Coast this week. The vote comes in the wake of Washington reconsidering a $555 million development-finance commitment to the bank and European nations cutting their overseas assistance budgets.  The AfDB headquarters in Ivory Coast. Photographer: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Bloomberg The setbacks come at a time when African countries are clamoring for support to build new infrastructure, deal with the fallout from climate change and pay for health and other programs that relied on aid halted by Donald Trump's administration. Mauritania's Sidi Ould Tah, one of five contenders to head the AfDB, sees scope for investors from the Gulf to help plug the funding gap. That region has a surfeit of capital. The sovereign wealth funds of Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia collectively have about $4 trillion in assets, dwarfing the AfDB's capital base of around $400 billion. Tah and Senegalese candidate Amadou Hott also say the lender needs to find a way to tap money from African institutions and wealthy individuals, who together hold $4.5 trillion and have traditionally focused on investing outside the continent. The AfDB currently lends around $10 billion annually, which meets less than a tenth of regional demand. Even if it does manage to entice more investors, its plans to double funding later this year from the $8.9 billion raised in a 2022 replenishment round look like a stretch. That may force it to scale back its ambitions of taking on a more prominent role in driving trade, development and economic growth across Africa, just when the continent badly needs it. — Katarina Höije and Antony Sguazzin Key stories and opinion:
AfDB Presidential Hopeful Eyes Funding From Private Investors
Trump AfDB Cut Calls for Realignment, Aspiring Leader Says
These 'Beautiful' Banks Are Expected to Save Climate Finance
AfDB Seeks Currency Fix to Unlock Funding for Africa Electricity
Our Financial Architecture Is Failing Africa: Akinwumi Adesina India's largest steelmaker got the all clear to buy a coal deposit in Mozambique after the seller recovered the concession rights. JSW Steel's $74 million deal to take over Minas de Revuboe, announced a year ago, ran into trouble when then-President Filipe Nyusi's administration revoked the local company's mining lease. MdR responded with legal and arbitration proceedings. The concession was restored to MdR — owned by the estate of Ken Talbot, an Australian mining tycoon who died 14 years ago — last week.  A JSW Steel plant in Dolvi, India. Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg Ivanhoe Mines shares slumped after it withdrew cost and production guidance for Africa's largest copper mine, where seismic activity has halted some underground operations. The Canadian firm is reviewing its copper output target of as much as 580,000 tons from the Kamoa-Kakula complex in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Preliminary signs are that the seismic activity could potentially continue for weeks, Ivanhoe said. Zimbabwe expects $2.6 billion in bridge financing — needed to repay debt owed to international financial institutions and regain access to capital markets — to be in place early next year. Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube shared details of the latest roadmap to revamp the southern African nation's loans at an event in Abidjan on Monday. The government wrote to 10 nations to request bridge funding and is currently negotiating with several of them, including the UK, Germany and Brazil, he said.  A market in Harare, Zimbabwe's capital. Photographer: Cynthia R Matonhodze/Bloomberg Kenya's economic growth rate is expected to slow for the second straight year amid headwinds from tight public finances and high debt levels, the World Bank said. The Washington-based lender expects gross domestic product in the East African nation to expand 4.5% in 2025, the slowest pace since the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020. The government is seeking a new International Monetary Fund program to ease the strain on its finances. Congo's former president, Joseph Kabila, slammed his successor after the nation's Senate stripped him of immunity from prosecution amid allegations he's supporting an armed rebellion in the east of the country. Kabila lashed out at President Felix Tshisekedi in a rare speech broadcast on YouTube, calling him a dictator and saying the decision to prosecute him was "arbitrary." The 53-year-old led mineral-rich Congo for 18 years, after which he became senator-for-life in accordance with Congolese law.  Kabila at his home in Kinshasa in December 2018. Photographer: John Wessels/AFP/Getty Images Barrick Mining said Mali's request to put its gold operations into provisional administration can't be legally justified. The Canadian mining company is locked in a dispute with the West African nation's junta over revenues from the vast Loulo-Gounkoto complex. The military government has blocked bullion exports and asked a judge to authorize the transfer of Barrick assets to an interim administrator. A commercial court in Mali is expected to rule on the matter next week. Thank you for your responses to our weekly Next Africa Quiz and congratulations to Peter Masue, who was first to correctly name Harvard — which boasts Botswana's Duma Boko and other many global leaders as graduates — as the university that was blocked by the US government from enrolling foreign students. (The move was temporarily halted by a federal judge). Central banks in key African economies are set to decide on interest rates in coming weeks against a highly uncertain global economic backdrop. Inflationary pressures are seen abating in Egypt, South Africa, Kenya, Mozambique, Eswatini and Lesotho, and their borrowing costs are expected to be lowered. The path is less clear in Nigeria, Zambia, Angola and Ghana, where interest rates are likely to be left unchanged. Thanks for reading. We'll be back in your inbox with the next edition on Friday. Send any feedback to mcohen21@bloomberg.net | 
