This book builds on the issues papers and synthesis of discussions of the Ninth African Development Forum, organized by the Economic Commission for Africa and its strategic African partners, and examines five thematic issues areas of development financing. These are deemed to have the potential to respond to Africa’s quest for alternative and innovative sources of finance to underwrite its economic transformation agenda. The five thematic areas are: Domestic resources mobilization, illicit financial flows, private equity, climate financing and new forms of partnership.

These innovative sources of finance offer the continent a range of options and opportunities. If they are properly leveraged, they would considerably reduce its dependence on external resources and provide the requisite resources for the implementation of regional and global development agendas, such as the evolving African Union Agenda 2063 and the post-2015 global development agenda. It demonstrates that a number of characteristic features of African economies are at the root of the rather low levels of mobilizing domestic resources, including: lowpublic and private savings rates; narrow tax bases;complex administrative andbureaucratic procedures;corruption; tax evasion;deficiencies in the growth and development of financial systems; and the high levels of dependence on external financing.

It makes a very strong case for robust policy measures to alter these features, with a view to enable African countries to be better equipped to capture sources of finance that are currently unexplored or poorly developed, including closing the loopholes that facilitate the haemorrhage of the continent’s financial resources through illicit financial outflows.