Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 23 April 2026 (ECA) – The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), through its Sub-Regional Office for West Africa and in partnership with Convergence and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), will convene Session II: Blended Finance and Emerging Innovative Instruments on 27 April 2026. The session is part of the Private Sector Forum at the Twelfth Session of the Africa Regional Forum on Sustainable Development (ARFSD 12), under the theme “Forward Faster: Scaling Private Sector Partnerships to Accelerate the SDGs in Africa.”
To be held at the United Nations Conference Centre in Addis Ababa, this meeting will bring together governments, development finance institutions, institutional investors, and private sector actors to tackle one of Africa’s most pressing challenges: transforming fragmented financing into scalable, investable delivery platforms capable of closing the SDG financing gap.
The session will focus on how blended finance structures, guarantees, project preparation facilities, regional investment platforms, and innovative debt instruments, including debt-for-development and debt-for-climate swaps, can be more effectively combined to unlock bankable pipelines and crowd in private capital at scale. It will also examine how constrained fiscal space and high borrowing costs continue to limit project viability, despite strong investor interest in Africa’s development potential.
As the Forum’s implementation-focused segment, Session II is designed to move from dialogue to delivery. It aims to identify priority investment models, strengthen alignment between public and private actors, and define practical next steps to unlock financing over the next 12 months. The outcomes will feed directly into ARFSD follow-up mechanisms, including the SDG Impact Labs.
Discussions will also explore how to strengthen project pipelines, scale derisking instruments, mobilize domestic institutional capital, and ensure that debt swap mechanisms effectively create fiscal space for SDG-aligned investments while preserving debt sustainability and investor confidence.
Overall, the session will underscore the importance of coordinated action to shift Africa’s development finance architecture from fragmented initiatives to integrated, scalable systems capable of accelerating SDG delivery across sectors and regions.
Issued by:
Communications Section
Economic Commission for Africa
PO Box 3001
Addis Ababa
Ethiopia
Tel: +251 11 551 5826
E-mail: eca-info@un.org