- AfDB, GCERF Forge New Pact to Link Jobs, Resilience and Extremism Prevention Across Africa
The African Development Bank and the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund have agreed to deepen cooperation aimed at linking development investment with community-led efforts to prevent violent extremism in fragile and conflict-affected parts of Africa.
The two institutions signed a Letter of Intent on September 21 on the margins of the 81st United Nations General Assembly in New York, setting out a framework through which local knowledge, development finance and economic opportunity can be brought together more deliberately.
The agreement reflects a growing recognition that investment outcomes can be undermined when governments and development institutions fail to address the social and economic conditions that allow instability to take root.
The partnership was signed by Marie-Laure Akin-Olugbade, Senior Vice President of the African Development Bank Group, and Stefano Manservisi, Chair of the GCERF Governing Board, at the African Union’s Permanent Observer Mission to the United Nations.
Its central premise is that fragility, exclusion and limited socio-economic opportunity can create conditions in which violent extremism becomes more likely, meaning development policy and prevention strategies cannot be treated as entirely separate agendas.
By combining GCERF’s community-level networks with the Bank’s analytical capacity and operational reach, the two organisations want to strengthen the connection between local resilience and larger-scale investment.
“This partnership reflects the simple but important idea that investment in prevention of violent extremism is also an investment in sustainable development,” Mr Manservisi said.
He argued that bringing GCERF’s community experience together with the Bank’s development expertise could build stronger links between economic opportunity, resilience and long-term stability.
The partnership is therefore being framed not as a traditional security intervention, but as an effort to protect development gains by reducing the conditions that can destabilise communities and economies.
For the African Development Bank, the agreement adds a community-level layer to its wider work in transition states and fragile environments. The Bank has for several years treated institutional weakness, social exclusion and limited economic opportunity as central development risks rather than simply security concerns, with its 2022–2026 fragility and resilience strategy focused on strengthening institutions, building resilient societies and catalysing private investment.
That strategy explicitly argues for greater investment in crisis prevention and for development interventions that address the root causes of instability rather than waiting for conflict to emerge.
Ms Akin-Olugbade said the partnership was designed to bring those different capabilities together.
“The Bank can help de-risk investment, strengthen institutions and align financing with national priorities,” she said, while GCERF contributes community-level prevention, local engagement and adaptive learning suited to fragile and conflict-affected settings.
“Together, we can ensure that resilience is not only financed from the top down, but shaped and sustained from the ground up.”
That distinction is significant because development projects in fragile regions often confront risks that conventional financial appraisal may not fully capture. Infrastructure, agriculture, health and private-sector investment can all be disrupted by weak institutions, conflict, displacement or violent extremist activity, while communities excluded from economic opportunities may remain vulnerable to recruitment by armed groups.
A development-finance institution that understands those risks earlier can potentially design projects differently, build stronger local partnerships and protect investment returns over a longer period.
GCERF’s role is intended to help provide that local intelligence and community engagement. The organisation describes itself as the only global fund dedicated specifically to preventing violent extremism and finances civil-society initiatives aimed at tackling local social, economic and political drivers of radicalisation.
Under the new framework, such community-level knowledge could feed more directly into policies and investments supported by the AfDB, particularly in countries where development projects operate in environments of persistent insecurity.
The two institutions also plan to promote shared learning and identify opportunities for joint initiatives that combine prevention, resilience and national development objectives. The collaboration is being linked to the Humanitarian-Development-Peace Nexus, an approach that seeks to reduce the fragmentation between emergency assistance, long-term development and peacebuilding.
In practical terms, that means local prevention work could be designed alongside economic programmes rather than treated as an entirely separate intervention financed through a different institutional channel.
The timing is important for the continent’s wider financing debate. The African Development Bank estimates Africa faces an annual development financing gap of roughly US$400bn, increasing pressure on governments and multilateral institutions to ensure scarce capital produces durable economic results.
The Bank has consequently been expanding co-financing arrangements and partnerships aimed at mobilising more capital while improving resilience to geopolitical, climate and economic shocks.
Fragility can make that financing gap harder to close because instability increases investment risk and can raise the cost of capital.
Private investors are generally more reluctant to commit long-term funding where political violence, weak institutions or social conflict threaten cash flows and asset security, while governments facing instability often divert resources from productive investment towards emergency spending.
Prevention therefore carries an economic dimension: reducing fragility can make development capital easier to deploy and more likely to remain productive.
The new partnership also aligns with the AfDB’s broader push to mobilise private investment rather than rely solely on public or concessional finance.
Earlier this year, the Bank secured political backing for a new African financial architecture and a pan-African guarantee mechanism intended to lower investment risk and improve access to capital.
Building resilience in fragile communities could complement those financial instruments by addressing some of the non-financial risks that guarantees alone cannot remove.
The challenge will be translating the Letter of Intent into measurable programmes. The announcement does not yet identify specific countries, financing envelopes or project pipelines under the partnership, meaning the immediate significance lies in the framework rather than in a quantified investment commitment.
Its eventual impact will depend on whether community-level information materially shapes project design, risk assessment and financing decisions rather than remaining an additional layer of consultation.
For African governments, the partnership also raises an important policy question about how economic development is integrated with national security and social cohesion.
Preventing violent extremism cannot be reduced to job creation alone, but persistent unemployment, exclusion and weak public institutions can deepen vulnerability in already fragile environments.
Better alignment between local prevention programmes and larger development investments could therefore give governments and financiers a more complete understanding of the conditions affecting project success.
The AfDB-GCERF agreement ultimately reflects a broader shift in development thinking: infrastructure and capital are not enough if the communities surrounding them remain economically excluded, politically marginalised or vulnerable to instability.
Development finance can build roads, power systems and businesses, but those investments are more durable when local institutions and communities are resilient enough to protect the gains.
The test will now be whether the partnership can turn that principle into projects where prevention is not treated as an afterthought, but as part of the investment case itself.
