AfDB Brand Guidelines: The 1963 Khartoum Agreement, Abidjan and the Tunis Years

An agreement among 23 governments.

The African Development Bank Group — AfDB in English and BAD, for Banque africaine de développement, in French — grew out of the movement for continental unity that followed the end of the colonial period. English Wikipedia says the agreement establishing the bank was signed by 23 African governments in Khartoum on 4 August 1963, at a conference of finance ministers convened by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, and came into force on 10 September 1964. French Wikipedia adds that the idea took shape in 1963 within the Organisation of African Unity, the forerunner of the African Union, and that the founding agreement was drafted by the commission’s secretariat together with a nine-member committee of experts from member states; although the United Nations helped prepare it, the bank is not formally part of the UN.

The first meeting of the Board of Governors was held in Lagos from 4 to 7 November 1964. The headquarters opened in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, in March 1965, and operations began on 1 July 1966, according to English Wikipedia. French Wikipedia says the bank’s first aim was to promote African self-reliance through non-concessional loans, and that its early work was held back by members’ limited ability to pay in their subscriptions.

Membership was at first open only to African countries. The bank began admitting non-African members in 1982, English Wikipedia says; French Wikipedia gives 1983 and says the opening raised the bank’s borrowing capacity. The group now has three parts: the African Development Bank itself; the African Development Fund, set up in 1972 to lend on concessional terms to lower-income members; and the Nigeria Trust Fund, set up by the Nigerian government in 1976.

Abidjan, Tunis and back.

The bank’s address has moved once. In 2003 its operations were relocated to a Temporary Relocation Agency in Tunis, Tunisia. English Wikipedia dates the stay from February 2003 to September 2014; French Wikipedia gives September 2003 to September 2014. French Wikipedia says the bank and the Ivorian government agreed on works in Abidjan, including restored offices and housing and schools for staff families, ahead of the return of the headquarters in 2014. By June 2015, English Wikipedia says, more than 1,500 staff were back in Abidjan.

The 1990s brought a period of reform. French Wikipedia says a consultants’ report in May 1994 was sharply critical of the bank’s management, that Standard & Poor’s lowered the rating of its long-term debt in August 1995, and that from 1995 the bank began a full programme of institutional reform meant to restore shareholders’ confidence. It later held top ratings again: French Wikipedia records an AAA rating from S&P Global in February 2021.

Governance follows a shareholder model. Member governments are represented on the Board of Governors, usually by a minister of finance, planning or cooperation, which meets at the Annual Meetings each May; day-to-day decisions on loans, grants and policy are taken by the Board of Executive Directors, with votes weighted by shareholding, English Wikipedia says. French Wikipedia counts 81 member countries: 54 African and 27 from Europe, the Americas and Asia. The bank also keeps its accounts in its own Unit of Account, registered under the ISO 4217 standard with the code XUA, which is used only for accounting between the bank and its members.

Development banks and their identities.

Development banks are owned by their member countries and economies rather than by private shareholders, and their websites put that ownership up front. The Asian Development Bank lists its 69 members with the year each one joined; the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank publishes a register of regional, non-regional and prospective members with their subscriptions and voting power. For these institutions the shareholder list is part of the brand, set out as openly as a logo.

Names travel in several languages. ADB’s website runs in English, Japanese and Chinese, with some country pages in other languages, and most of these lenders are known by short sets of initials that have to read the same on a loan document in one country and a project sign in another. The palettes in this group of guides lean on deep blues, greens and teals, chosen here as our own unofficial interpretations rather than official colours.

Their websites are organised around what they finance and where. ADB’s menus divide its work by region and subregional programme and separate public- from private-sector financing, which can take the form of loans, guarantees or equity; the AIIB sorts its project list by status, from proposed to approved, on hold or cancelled, and by sovereign-backed and nonsovereign-backed financing. These project databases are where a reader can follow a single road, power line or water scheme from proposal onward.

Accountability is presented as part of the same identity. ADB lists an Accountability Mechanism and Independent Evaluation among its pages; the AIIB has its Project-affected People’s Mechanism, approved in 2018. Alongside annual reports and financial statements, these evaluation pages and complaint routes are where the banks set out, in their own words, how their projects are reviewed.

A ninth president, sworn in at Abidjan.

Leadership changes hands at the annual meetings. On 29 May 2025 the governors elected Sidi Ould Tah, the Mauritanian economist who had led the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa, with 76.18 per cent of the votes, Premium Times reported; he was sworn in at the Abidjan headquarters on 1 September 2025 as the bank’s ninth president, succeeding Akinwumi Adesina, who had served two five-year terms. CNBC Africa covered the same handover. Premium Times described the bank as Africa’s largest development finance institution, and reported that the new president set out four priorities for his first hundred days, among them a fast-track reform agenda and deeper partnerships.

English Wikipedia lists the bank’s main functions as loans and equity investments for its regional member countries, technical assistance for development projects and programmes, promoting public and private investment, and helping members shape development policy. Infrastructure — power supply, water and sanitation, transport and communications — has traditionally taken the largest share of its lending, by the same account. In February 2025 the bank and Interpol signed a letter of intent on closer cooperation against corruption, English Wikipedia reports.

Its names carry much of its identity. The bank works in English and French and is known by two acronyms, AfDB and BAD, while its Unit of Account gives it a currency code of its own and its Abidjan base, regained in 2014, anchors the name to a city.

For a design guide, AfDB shows how a multilateral bank carries a bilingual name, a home city and a long institutional record in one identity. Compare ADB, another regional development bank, and the World Bank. For this guide we use a deep green, a warm gold and a sand white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep AfDB’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.