By Kalinga Seneviratne
BANGKOK, Thailand | 21 October 2026 (IDN) — The IMF-World Bank annual meeting returned to Bangkok last week (12 to 18 October) after more than three decades, with nervous Thai authorities going to great lengths to stem any disruptions to it by civil society protests.
Inside Bangkok’s convention center, World Bank’s turbaned American-Sikh President Ajay Banga led a charm offensive to convince the world that the Bank is transforming the development model of previous generations to one that addresses the expectations of equality among nations. He even talked about building models that develop local industries that create local jobs and keep the value of their natural resources at home. He even launched a Philanthropy Hub in Bangkok, which the Bank claims will take them in a direction of more partnerships with a variety of stakeholders.
While the World Bank was talking about mobilizing private funding to compensate for reducing foreign “aid” budgets from “donor” nations, at a two-day “Development Impact” side-event organized by the Washington based development reporting social enterprise Devex, which was dominated by speakers from Africa and Asia, one felt as if the “Bandung Spirit” was returning to international development dialogue.
In 1955, 29 newly independent countries led by Indonesia, Egypt, India, and China met in Bandung in Indonesia in a historic Africa-Asia Conference that launched the Non-Aligned Movement. Though that movement has lost its shine in the past 2 decades, that spirit seems to be awakening with Africans feeling inspired by the economic rise of Asia, especially China and India. This was reflected in presentations by African speakers at the Forum.
For the past half a century, Western countries in particular, have been taking away the valuable mineral resources of Africa giving them a pittance in return as “royalties”. Inspired by the Chinese model, where they used their mineral resources to build batteries and electric cars and export them to the world, Africans are now saying, they can do the same, by creating industries in Africa that employs Africans to process and develop products using these minerals, first for the African market and then export to the world. But, they would like assistance from Asia to help train their people for this new era.
“We have very strong (development) partnership with China. We have increasing partnerships with India and (South)Korea,” Mavis Owusu-Gyamfi, President and CEO of the Ghana based African Center for Economic Transformation told IDN in an interview. “These countries have the technology, but, it’s not just about adopting technology, we need to get it to work for us”.
Africans are pointing out that as a region it has a population of 1.5 billion people, and estimated to increase to 2.7 billion by 2050. Most Africans are currently poor, as Asia used to be fifty years ago. So Asia could share their development experience and the two regions work jointly to uplift both regions for their mutual benefit, with Africa having the potential to be the growth engine of the world in two decades.
Pointing out to how China developed its electric car industry, Owusu-Gyamfi says, “we want China not to take our raw materials, but to work with us to add value to it, to build the battery. We need to learn that technique. We need to learn the skills.”
At a panel discussion on South-South cooperation at the Devex Forum, African Union Commissioner on economic policy and sustainable development, Patrick Ndzana Olomo said, “our endowment in terms of mineral resources is certainly high. African Continental Free Trade Area, you have 55 countries, you have a population of 1.5 billion people comparable to what you have in China or in India”. Thus, he added, that this calls for strategic partnerships, “processing should start locally in Africa to make sure that we keep the jobs in the continent”.
Indonesia is expected to become the world’s fifth largest economy within 2 decades, and Muhammad Rachmat Kaimuddin, managing director, development investment of Indonesia’s PT Danantara Development Management Fund speaking on the same panel said that they will be open to collaborate with Africa to see whether Indonesia’s ability to transform mineral wealth to local industrialization could be transformed to Africa. “We do have some final products industries they would like to be also interested to integrate that with Africa,” he noted. “We have to move things together to ensure we have trade terms and investment facilities between the two regions. And we have to share experience on sustainable resource governance”.
In an interview with IDN, Dr Hod Anyigba, executive director and chief economist of the African Regional Organisation of the International Trade Union Confederation warned about too much hype of Africa-Asia collaboration, especially the Chinese concept of shared prosperity in development assistance.
Pointing to a Chinese aid project in Zambia, he said “yes China has built a road, a school, a bridge, it looks like a type of exchange, but, they have sent the worker, even cleaners to build that infrastructure. So no skills transfer. There is a toll on the new road and a Chinese company collects it for 15 years because they have built it”.
“I don’t know where the shared prosperity is coming, when there is no skills transfer, there’s no upskilling, there’s no education” notes Anyighba. “This infrastructure debts are more dangerous than liquidity debts World Bank and IMF gives to pay off other debts ,” argues Anyigba. “The whole concept of development assistance needs to focus more on creating local jobs and, creating income for the locals where certain percentage of profits could go to the investor”.
Owusu-Gyamfi notes that the Chinese don’t talk about aid, “they say its investments they are making. That’s two-way and you need to make sure you get your side of the bargain. For that politicians need to be clean”. She argues that some of the debt from China “has been so much more productive than some of the other debts we’ve had,” and points to an infrastructure project in Ethiopia. “It’s a joint-venture between Chinese and Ethiopian companies that is adding value to local resources and transforming the economy”.
“When we negotiate with China we need to make sure that it is a joint venture investment and that we learn from them” argues Owusu-Gyamfi.
One of the African speakers at the Devex forum pointed out that there are billions of dollars available within Africa in pension funds, but these are invested in foreign bond markets mainly in the West. At the May 2025 African Development Bank meeting in Abidjan, the “hidden capital wealth” of Africa in pension funds were discussed. Senior executives from major African financial institutions presented compelling evidence challenging long-held assumptions about the continent’s capital scarcity during a high-profile panel discussion. It was revealed that in 2024, Africans invested $125 billion in cryptocurrency assets.
Owusu-Gyamfi believes these are assets that could transform Africa if invested in the continent. “We have a culture of investing overseas. We need to change the culture of investing” she argues. “We are a high-risk market with high returns. When you are only allowed to invest 5 percent in high risk, you’re not going to do a lot on the African continent”.
The New African Financial Architecture for Development (NAFAD), led by the African Development Bank Group, responds to this diagnosis with a system-level framework that reorganizes how capital and risk are deployed across Africa’s financial ecosystem. It was endorsed by AU Heads of State in February 2026 in Addis Ababa, and adopted through the Abidjan Consensus on 9 April 2026.
Referring to this, Owusu-Gyamfi argues that “it’s about bringing our financial institutions together and getting them to work with each other and minimize the risk. Then we can leverage that four trillion (or so funds) through these financial institutions to invest in African development”.