Africa’s Development Balance Sheets Offer a New Roadmap for Global Cooperation

In a RootsToFoods Capital Series interview, Alexia Latortue, head of the secretariat of the Future of Development Cooperation Coalition and former U.S. Treasury assistant secretary, explains why a system designed after the Second World War must be reshaped around countries’ own development priorities and why she rejects the claim that aid is no longer relevant.

Ovidiu Bujorean, chief executive officer of OviBees Ventures, spoke with Latortue for the fourth conversation in Wave 2 of the RootsToFoods Capital Series. Latortue has worked at CGAP, the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the U.S. Treasury, where she served as a Senate-confirmed assistant secretary for international trade and development. Co-hosted by the African Center for Economic Transformation and the Center for Global Development, and co-chaired by former Nigerian Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and former Spanish Foreign Minister Arancha González Laya, the Coalition is seeking to reimagine how development cooperation operates.

Across all four interviews, Latortue encountered the same institutional pattern. “Institutions generally are full of inertia, and individual people within institutions have a lot of power to move that inertia,” she said. She cited efforts under Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to modernize multilateral development banks, integrate climate and development priorities and expand their capacity to provide financing. Progress depended on committed leadership, strong technical evidence, trust among borrowing and donor countries, and a political opening created by rising debt and fiscal pressures. Her impatience with a familiar objection was clear: “I don’t really buy it when people say we’ve tried it before.”

During the Coalition’s consultations, participants from emerging markets rarely began with aid or even finance as the primary constraint. They first considered whether a country had a clear, shared development vision and the capacity to pursue it, along with the freedom to draw lessons from the Gulf on one issue and Kenya on another. “It’s not a north-south thing at all,” she said.

“Every country, even the poorest country, has assets and liabilities.”

Alexia Latortue, Head of Secretariat, Future of Development Cooperation Coalition

That premise anchors the Coalition’s first report, The Development Balance Sheet, published in May 2026. Assets include the capacity to innovate, tax revenue, access to borrowing and natural resources. Liabilities include unsustainable debt, a changing climate, weak institutions and illicit financial outflows. Once a country establishes its priorities, it can identify the external partnerships it needs, including financing, technology and knowledge. The framework is deliberately broad: Nigeria, the report notes, receives more than 7.5 times as much in remittances as it does in official development assistance.

The Coalition’s next paper identifies four purposes for development cooperation: ending deprivation and protecting people in crisis; advancing economic transformation, which emerged markets consider especially urgent; addressing shared challenges that “have no passports,” including climate change and pandemics; and fostering knowledge and innovation. Without this clarity, she said, actors can work at cross purposes and undermine trust.

In five years, Latortue hopes to see more confident governments that set their own trajectories and select fewer, longer-term partnerships at greater scale. Partners, in turn, should identify their comparative advantages in relation to a country’s priorities rather than produce “50 different country plans for Malawi from different people around the world, but not Malawi.” Accountability should be tied to outcomes rather than money disbursed, with countries engaging one another as peers and “really treating countries as equals.”

Asked how to reform the system from within, she was direct. “I think every institution needs fresh air,” she said, particularly because institutions created after 1945 no longer reflect the contemporary world. But she is “a big believer in being bold, but also in building, not destroying,” since insiders often possess the information needed to accelerate change. She also wants institutions to plan for their own conclusion: “Every time we create something new, an institution or a fund, we never have sunset clauses.”

On aid, Latortue drew a careful distinction. Official development assistance fell 23.1 percent in real terms in 2025, according to preliminary OECD data—the largest annual decline on record. ODA has long represented only a small share of the forces driving development, yet it remains vital during humanitarian crises and in fragile settings where extreme poverty is concentrated. “I am not in the camp of people who say ODA is dead,” she said. “Because it’s small and because it’s so precious, and because used well it can be so catalytic, we had better use it exceptionally well.”

The case for examining a wider range of financial flows, she argued, is “not linked to ODA falling. It’s linked to the fact that this is what drives development”: domestic public and private investment, foreign investment and local savings. Nor should the private sector be expected to manage development alone. Chief executives she met in Kigali repeatedly emphasized the need for supportive institutions. “We can come in, we have financing, we have ideas, but I need rule of law. I need a capable workforce that is healthy, that is educated.”

Signs of change are already emerging, she said. Rwanda requires partners to align with its national vision and has financed near-universal health coverage in creative ways, including through solidarity between richer and poorer citizens. Multilateral development banks, although “not there yet,” are also beginning to act as enablers rather than simply financiers, particularly in middle-income countries. By providing guarantees, they can “unlock even institutional investors in your own country.”

When asked about the most underrated quality for someone reforming a large institution from within, Latortue offered a concise answer: “Leaving their egos at the door.”

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