Director says African Development Bank lagging on gender equality

Even as they promote lending to female entrepreneurs, development banks need to do more to ensure gender equality internally — that was the message from three top officials from the African Development Bank, Development Bank of Rwanda, and European Investment Bank, in Côte d’Ivoire last month.

Malado Kaba, formerly Guinea’s first female minister of finance and economy, began her role as director of gender, women and civil society at AfDB earlier this year. 

She told journalists at the Finance in Common summit of public development banks in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, last month that when it comes to gender equality, rather than “paying lip service, we need to practice what we preach to others, and especially to the African countries that we aim to support.”

“I think that when it comes to the African Development Bank, things are not quite yet where they should be. When you look at top leadership, it remains male. And I think this really calls us to do much more, and to promote more women at the top,” Kaba said. She added that this was especially the case in roles related to science, technology, engineering, and math.

According to AfDB’s latest organizational chart, three of its eight vice presidents are women, along with six of the 15 people in other senior roles listed as reporting to bank President Akinwumi Adesina. A spokesperson for AfDB was approached for comment. Following the publication of this story, AfDB’s director for communication and external relations, Solomon Mugera, told Devex that aside from President Adesina, women make up 50% of all permanent executive leadership appointments including senior vice presidents, vice presidents, senior directors, and directors-general.

Kaba was speaking at a press conference on the expansion of EIB’s SheInvest initiative, which aims to encourage lending that supports gender equality and women’s empowerment.

Devex asked Kaba, along with Development Bank of Rwanda CEO Kampeta Sayinzoga and EIB Vice President Thomas Östros, whether development banks needed to do more to promote women internally, even as they rolled out efforts to target women through their lending.

Aside from Odile Renaud-Basso at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and Kristalina Georgievia at the International Monetary Fund, the regular meetings of the heads of multilateral development banks, for instance, are made up of men.

Sayinzoga said that beyond appointing female leaders, banks also needed to ask whether women were sufficiently represented in their internal committee structures.

“Often, that's an easier problem to fix than just looking at the CEO,” she said, provided there was a deliberate effort inside institutions, including to “self-impose some minimum quotas.” 

EIB has also come in for criticism on its gender record internally, with the European Parliament noting in a report earlier this year that the bank “failed to meet its original gender balance targets for 2021 and that women remain underrepresented in senior positions.”

According to EIB’s most recently available Diversity and inclusion progress report, at the end of 2020, women made up 42% of officers, 35% of senior officers, and 30% of managers.

Östros told reporters in Abidjan that overall “the financial market is a fundamentally gender-unequal part of society, and there's a long way to go before we have reached gender equality. And I think that should be a sort of fuel to our work, not an obstacle. We need to change.”

“I think we should work consciously in our organization to foster gender equality, create development and see that we are also step-by-step being more gender-equal institutions,” Östros added. “I think that would be very good for business and for progress.”

Editor’s note: The reporter’s travel to Abidjan was supported by EIB. Devex maintains full editorial control over the content.

Update, Nov. 15, 2022: This story has been updated with comment from the African Development Bank’s director for communication and external relations.