African leaders have set up a $2.5 trillion fund for investment in roads, railways, energy grids, and border infrastructure.
They say this will define how Africans move, trade, and do business with one another for generations to come.
This fund is expected to usher in a new era of cross-border economic integration, under the Africa Infrastructure Financing Facility (AIFF).
Through the @AAMFI_Sec, African-owned institutions are coordinating capital, scaling priority projects, and strengthening Africa’s financial architecture. @afreximbank @africa_finance @EADB_Official @Africa_RE @ShelterAfrique @TdbGroup @ATI_ACA @ZEPRE_PTAReins @BOAD_official pic.twitter.com/zj1p7Zor0w
— AAMFI (@AAMFI_Sec) February 25, 2026
Experts also say this infrastructure will define how Africans move, trade, and do business with one another for generations to come.
Financial deployment
The launch took place during the Third Presidential High-Level Dialogue of the Alliance of African Multilateral Financial Institutions (AAMFI), convened on the margins of the 39th African Union Summit under the theme: “Strengthening Africa’s Financial Architecture to Finance Agenda 2063.”
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Ghana’s President John Mahama, who serves as the African Union Champion on AU Financial Institutions, laid out the central challenge with striking clarity.
“Africa has domestic capital pools exceeding USD 2.5 trillion. The challenge is not the availability of capital, but how intentionally we deploy it into infrastructure, industrialisation, and job creation to realise Agenda 2063 and the African Continental Free Trade Area,” he declared.
What the AIFF Will Do for Cross-Border Movement
At its core, the AIFF is about closing the gap between ambition and execution — between projects that are approved on paper and projects that actually get built.
The President and CEO of the Africa Finance Corporation, Samaila Zubairu, said African institutions with over $70 billion in combined balance sheets must act collectively to close Africa’s trade, investment, and development financing gaps, stressing that scale, alignment, and disciplined capital mobilisation are critical for transformative infrastructure.
At the 39th @_AfricanUnion Summit in Addis Ababa, African Heads of State launched the Africa Infrastructure Financing Facility (AIFF) under the @AAMFI_Sec Presidential Dialogue – a major step toward mobilising long-term capital for priority infrastructure aligned with Agenda 2063… pic.twitter.com/ArUetyhCiv
— African Export-Import Bank – Afreximbank (@afreximbank) February 25, 2026
Afreximbank Chairman Dr. George Elombi identified the most persistent constraint to infrastructure delivery: the gap between political approval and financial execution, noting that too many projects stall not because they lack relevance, but because they are insufficiently prepared, inadequately structured, or misaligned with the requirements of long-term capital.
The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) has unlocked a single market of 1.3 billion people and a combined GDP of over $3.4 trillion.
To fully realise its potential, AfCFTA requires significant investment in efficient logistics corridors, ports, border infrastructure, and multimodal transport networks.
