The Africa Resilience Forum (ARF) 2025, organized by the African Development Bank, wrapped up in Abidjan last week. In a moment of growing fragility across the continent, the forum highlighted how resilience and prevention must align with financing strategies that aim for peace, inclusion, and sustainability.
Key Insights from ARF 2025
1. Bridging Fragility and Finance
ARF 2025 placed the mid-term review of the AfDB’s Strategy to Address Fragility and Build Resilience (2022–2026) front and center, signaling a push to integrate fragility concerns into the Bank’s core operations. The emphasis on prevention aligns closely with peace-positive investing, where anticipating risk becomes part of project design.
2. Diverse Thematic Priorities
Core themes included climate resilience, food security, women’s entrepreneurship, youth economic resilience, and regional integration. These are precisely areas where investments need a peace lens — not just technical solutions, but context-sensitive, equity-driven approaches.
3. Partnerships & Nexus Thinking
One of the most promising signals was the engagement of organizations such as ICRC, Interpeace, SIPRI, and the World Economic Forum to operationalize the humanitarian-development-peace nexus. Aligning financial tools across sectors is a necessary, though complex, step toward scalable, peace-positive interventions. The Forum concluded with a new collaboration between the African Development Bank and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), signaling renewed commitment to cross-institutional approaches for resilience and recovery. This partnership reflects growing momentum to operationalize the Humanitarian–Development–Peace nexus — a shift increasingly mirrored in emerging financing models and outcome-based initiatives that link stability with sustainable investment.
4. From Dialogue to Action
The forum pledged to deliver outcome reports, action plans, and multi-stakeholder coalitions that can carry the momentum forward. The challenge now is whether these pledges translate into sustained, risk-tolerant peace positive financing in fragile settings.
Why This Matters for PeaceFinance.org
PeaceFinance.org aims to anchor investment in a lens of peace and resilience. What ARF 2025 showed is that resonance exists at institutional levels — but uptake demands tools, frameworks, and networks that can operationalize those ideas. As we roll out our tools, workshops, and community of practitioners, insights from ARF 2025 will help shape what kinds of products, cases, and frameworks we prioritize.
We invite you to join the conversation as we turn high-level commitments into actionable peace-positive investment strategies. Follow PeaceFinance.org for insights, tools, and workshops on making finance a driver of peace and resilience.
