Securing Africa’s Future: Ring-Fencing Development Financing in an Era of Security-Focused Economic Policy

Africa is facing mutually reinforcing challenges, including trade fragmentation, security focused economic policies, fiscal limitations and technological disruption, which have created a development landscape of unprecedented complexity and constraint. At the same time, there is a systematic mismatch between Africa’s long-term development needs and the short-term fiscal and political pressures that dominate policymaking. This policy brief argues that ring-fencing development expenditures is a potential pathway to reconciling this mismatch. Although there are many challenges spanning the technical, political and institutional domains, this policy brief outlines several policy mechanisms to institutionalise ring-fencing of development financing that have proven to be effective in a number of countries.