Devex 2d ago

For decades, tracking African development finance meant following distinct, parallel tracks: the big shortfall in urban housing, the push to bring households onto the electrical grid, and the high-stakes scramble for the continent's critical minerals. On the surface, these read like entirely separate economic beats. However, a shift has taken place as the climate crisis has migrated from the margins of development policy to the center, acting as a master filter that rewrites the fundamental questions governments and investors are forced to ask. That reality is visible across the board. A housing deficit is no longer just a question of financing enough units, but of doing so without triggering an emissions spike, while a minerals rush is no longer judged purely by extraction volume, but by whether host nations can capture the downstream jobs of the energy transition. In this video, we look at how this new reality operates on the ground and explore what happens to the economies that are able to adapt — and those that are not.