Africa: Every Country Has a Balance Sheet - Development Cooperation Should Start There

In a RootsToFoods Capital Series interview, Alexia Latortue, Head of 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 redesigned around countries’ own visions, and why she is not in the camp that says aid is dead.

Ovidiu Bujorean, chief executive officer of OviBees Ventures, spoke with Alexia Latortue, Head of Secretariat of the Future of Development Cooperation Coalition, for the fourth conversation of Wave 2 of the RootsToFoods Capital Series. Latortue has worked inside CGAP at the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the U.S. Treasury, where she was Senate-confirmed Assistant Secretary for International Trade and Development. The Coalition, co-hosted by the African Center for Economic Transformation (ACET) and the Center for Global Development (CGD) and co-chaired by former Nigerian Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and former Spanish Foreign Minister Arancha González Laya, is reimagining how development cooperation delivers.

The pattern she saw across all four was the same. “Institutions generally are full of inertia, and individual people within institutions have a lot of power to move that inertia,” she said. She points to the push under Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to evolve the multilateral development banks, treating climate and development as intertwined and stretching their balance sheets. It took a leader willing to back her team, deep technical evidence, trust built with borrowing and donor countries alike, and a political window opened by rising debt and fiscal pressure. Hence her impatience with one familiar objection: “I don’t really buy it when people say we’ve tried it before.”

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In the Coalition’s consultations, emerging-market participants rarely started with aid, or even with finance as the binding constraint, she said. They started with whether a country has a clear, shared vision for its own development and the ability to execute it, and with the freedom to learn from the Gulf on one issue and Kenya on another. “It’s not a north-south thing at all.”

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

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

That is the premise of the Coalition’s first report, The Development Balance Sheet, published in May 2026. Assets include a capacity to innovate, tax revenue, access to borrowing and natural resources; liabilities include unsustainable debt, a changing climate, weak institutions and illicit outflows. A country that knows what it prioritizes can then articulate which external partnerships it needs, financial but also technological and knowledge-based. The lens is wide: Nigeria, the report notes, receives more than 7.5 times as much in remittances as in official development assistance.

The Coalition’s next paper proposes four purposes for development cooperation: ending deprivation and protecting people in crisis; economic transformation, the strongest call from emerging markets; advancing the common good on challenges “that have no passports,” such as climate change and pandemics; and creating knowledge and innovation. Without that clarity, she said, actors work at cross purposes and trust erodes.

Five years out, she hopes to see more confident governments that set their own trajectory and pick fewer, longer-term partnerships at greater scale, and partners that state their comparative advantage against a country’s plan instead of producing “50 different country plans for Malawi from different people around the world, but not Malawi.” Accountability would follow outcomes rather than money disbursed, with countries engaging one another as peers: “really treating countries as equals.”

On reforming the system from inside, she was direct. “I think every institution needs fresh air,” she said, not least because the post-1945 architecture no longer reflects the world. But she is “a big believer in being bold, but also in building, not destroying,” since insiders often hold the information that accelerates change. She also wants institutions to plan for their own end: “Every time we create something new, an institution or a fund, we never have sunset clauses.”

On aid, she drew a careful line. Official development assistance fell 23.1 percent in real terms in 2025, according to OECD preliminary data, the largest annual drop on record. Latortue noted that ODA has long been a small part of what drives development success, while remaining vital in 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 need to look at a much 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 anyone conclude that the private sector can do it all. Chief executives she met in Kigali told her the same thing, she said: “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.”

The most promising signs of change are already visible, she said. Rwanda insists that partners align with its national vision, and finances near-universal health insurance creatively, including through solidarity between better-off and poorer Rwandans. And the multilateral development banks, while “not there yet,” are starting to act as enablers rather than only financiers, especially in middle-income countries, using guarantees “to unlock even institutional investors in your own country.”

Asked for the most underrated skill for anyone reforming a large institution from within, Latortue kept it short: “Leaving their egos at the door.”

Alexia Latortue spoke with Ovidiu Bujorean, chief executive officer of OviBees Ventures and host and designer of the RootsToFoods Capital Series, for Episode 9 of the series, the fourth episode of Wave 2. Latortue is Head of Secretariat of the Future of Development Cooperation Coalition, a Distinguished Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Global Development and a member of the board of ODI Global, and previously served as Assistant Secretary for International Trade and Development at the U.S. Treasury. The views expressed are her own. RootsToFoods Capital Series is produced by OviBees Ventures, with AV Ventures, an ACDI/VOCA affiliate, as founding partner, and is distributed in partnership with AllAfrica Global Media. Wave 2 continues November 3 with Kanini Mutooni of the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation and Dr. Frank Aswani of the African Venture Philanthropy Alliance.

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