Bridging Africa’s Financing Gaps: How Smarter Planning is Powering the Continent’s Development Push

NEW YORK, USA — As 2030 looms ever closer, African countries face pressing questions: Can they secure the funding and capacity necessary to deliver on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Africa’s own Agenda 2063?

With the world’s economic climate tightening and donor aid plateauing, many African governments are betting their futures on a less glamorous, but arguably more powerful lever for change: integrated, long-term planning.

This evolving approach was the focus of a recent session at the United Nations’ High-Level Political Forum (HLPF), co-organised by the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), and the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA).

There, policy-makers, planning experts, and civil society leaders gathered to debate how “future-oriented planning”, where development ambition and realistic budgeting are closely linked, is becoming a lifeline for the continent’s pursuit of prosperity.

Africa’s sustainable development challenges are as much about finance as they are about ambition. The continent’s infrastructure funding gap alone is estimated at $68–$108 billion annually. High debt burdens and a declining share of official development assistance have left African leaders searching for new answers.

“Long-term planning pushes countries to think beyond the immediate, ensuring that development strategies are more adaptive, coordinated and resilient,” Nassim Oulmane, Chief of the Green and Blue Economy Section at ECA, told attendees. Too often, he argued, countries fall into “firefighting”, reacting to crises as they come, instead of building the systems necessary to withstand shocks and seize opportunities.

Speaker after speaker highlighted that bridging finance gaps is about more than finding money; it’s about ensuring that every dollar works harder. That requires systems thinking: understanding how policies, taxes, investment plans, and government operations interact.

Ethiopia is rolling out a ten-year national plan, backed by reforms to tax collection and domestic revenue efforts designed to shrink the nation’s reliance on external support.
Uganda has overhauled its planning processes, aligning them directly with the SDGs for greater efficiency and accountability across sectors.
Sierra Leone is piloting long-term planning at the ministry and sectoral level to drive investments, from healthcare to energy, that line up with real priorities, not donor preferences.
Nigeria is working to coordinate planning and budgeting not just at the national level but state by state, an approach designed to better reflect the country’s vast diversity.

All these nations, forum participants noted, are building on lessons from the 2024 Seville Financing for Development (FfD4) conference, where domestic resource mobilisation, such as tax reform, fighting illicit financial flows, and modernising procurement, took centre stage.

IV ZEAL VITAMIN

One concrete tool discussed was the Integrated Regional Planning Toolkit (IRPT), promoted by ECA and APRM. This approach helps governments embed multi-year planning into national strategies and fiscal frameworks. Rather than treating development planning as a wish list separate from budgets, the toolkit forces tough questions about trade-offs, funding sources, and real-world sequencing.

Esther Mwangi, a Kenyan Ministry of Planning official attending virtually, called it “a recipe for moving from paper to projects and projects to impact.”

Africa’s financing gap is not just a technical issue; it’s a source of lost potential and lost lives. The continent still suffers from vast “capital leakages” through tax evasion, misallocated projects, and procurement corruption. According to ECA estimates, Africa loses billions each year to inefficiencies that better planning could help eliminate.

The World Bank’s most recent Africa Pulse report also argues that while GDP is growing in many countries, the real impact is blunted by gaps in planning, coordination, and implementation. Human development indicators such as school completion, maternal health, and household electrification improve much more in places where long-term systems and transparent budgeting underpin government work.

Model nations such as Rwanda and Morocco have made headlines for the effectiveness of their long-term national visions paired with tight monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. A report from the African Development Bank found that every $1 invested in planning typically delivers $7–10 in project efficiency when plans are actually linked to budgets.

Further, the changing global financing environment marked by shrinking grants, increased competition for private capital, and pressure to achieve climate goals means African countries will increasingly need to rely on domestic resource mobilisation and realistic, enforceable plans to close their finance gaps.

As Africa moves into the “Decade of Acceleration” for the SDGs and Agenda 2063, participants in New York underscored that the quality of planning and how well plans are executed may ultimately determine the continent’s development path.

Perhaps no one put it better than APRM’s senior advisor, Musa Sillah: “Better planning is not a luxury. It’s an economic necessity. It’s what will make Africa’s dreams and commitments real.”