The Rise of Information Infrastructure in Development Finance
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On 10 July 2026, the African Development Bank and the Ivorian government launched the One-Stop Shop for Private Investment Reporting, known by its French acronym GUDIP (African Development Bank, 2026). The platform will centralise data on private investment that has, until now, sat scattered across sector-specific codes for water, environment, electricity, oil, and mining (African Development Fund, 2021). Financed through the Programme to Support the Improvement of the Business Climate in Côte d’Ivoire, the project carries a modest price tag of $14.2 million (African Development Bank, 2026). Read narrowly, it is a digital government story: a new reporting tool for the Directorate General of the Economy, welcome but perhaps unremarkable.
Read against the wider record of multilateral development bank activity, GUDIP looks different. It belongs to a pattern in which development finance institutions have started treating information itself as a target for investment, alongside roads, energy, and ports. This is fundamentally necessary.
The appraisal report for PACA-CI, the programme under which GUDIP sits, makes the diagnosis explicit. Ivorian authorities had ‘no unified information system on enterprises and industrial activities’ prior to the intervention, and the absence of any inclusive master plan for that data left the state unable to act on it (African Development Fund, 2021). The remedy proposed was not another isolated project but a digital resource centre intended to draw informal enterprises into a formal, trackable economy. Data collection here is not a reporting obligation bolted onto a development project. It is treated as the precondition for the project to function at all.
The same logic appears at regional and continental scale. The OECD’s review of investment promotion agencies across the Economic Community of West African States calls for member states to integrate sustainability indicators into their monitoring systems, arguing that agencies must ‘understand and track their contribution to the desired outcomes’ if their promotion of sustainable investment is to mean anything (OECD, 2024). The African Development Bank’s Data Innovation Lab has partnered with the World Bank Group’s Data Academy since December 2023 to build statistical capacity across the continent, on the premise that closing Africa’s data gaps is now a prerequisite for closing its financing gap (Kouta and Kumar, 2024). None of these initiatives moves physical capital. Each is designed to make existing capital flows visible, comparable and usable by the institutions and investors who depend on them.
Paul Bisca’s recent Brookings commentary supplies the clearest statement of why this matters. Writing on private capital mobilisation in fragile states, Bisca argues that ‘fragility is, in part, an information disorder’ (Bisca, 2026), and that multilateral development banks hold an underused asset in the strategic intelligence generated by their fragility assessments, country diagnostics, and field presence. His point extends beyond fragile states. Private capital anywhere prices risk according to the information available to it, and where that information is thin, fragmented or unverifiable, capital either stays away or prices in a premium that the underlying economy cannot sustain. GUDIP, on this reading, is one small instrument responding to a large and increasingly well-recognised problem.
What ties these examples together is a shift in what counts as development infrastructure. For decades, the discipline understood infrastructure as physical: transmission lines, ports, irrigation systems. GUDIP, the PACA-CI data centre, and the AfDB–World Bank statistical partnership suggest a parallel category is actively taking shape, one in which information systems, diagnostic capacity, and analytical judgement are treated with the same seriousness as concrete and steel. This reflects a judgement, made repeatedly across separate institutions and separate programmes, that better investment decisions depend on better information architecture, and that building that architecture is a legitimate and fundable object of development finance in its own right.
It would be premature to read too much into any single platform. GUDIP centralises Ivorian investment declarations. It does not evaluate creditworthiness, and no claim of that kind is being made here. But the institutional appetite it reflects is worth considering. If multilateral development banks are increasingly willing to fund the systems that make investment information legible, verifiable, and usable, then the question of what other informational gaps in the sovereign finance architecture might one day attract the same kind of support becomes harder to dismiss. Sovereign credit formation is one such gap. GUDIP does not answer that question but it, and other initiatives like it are increasingly making it that question easier to ask.
Bibliography
African Development Bank (2026) African Development Bank Group supports launch of Côte d’Ivoire’s One-Stop Shop for Private Investment Reporting, 20 July. Available at: https://www.afdb.org/en/news-and-events/african-development-bank-group-supports-launch-cote-divoires-one-stop-shop-private-investment-reporting-95616 (Accessed: 21 July 2026).
African Development Fund (2021) Business Climate Improvement Support Programme for the Structural Transformation of the Ivorian Economy (PACA-CI) – Phase I Appraisal Report. Abidjan: African Development Fund.
Bisca, P.M. (2026) ‘Capital with a compass: How to unlock investments in the hardest places’, Brookings, Future Development, 17 July.
Kouta, M. and Kumar, R. (2024) ‘Transforming Africa: World Bank and the African Development Bank unite for data-driven progress’, World Bank Blogs, 26 August.
OECD (2024) Sustainable Investment Policy Perspectives in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Paris: OECD Publishing.