Development Finance

The Rise of Information Infrastructure in Development Finance

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.‍ ‍

From Mauritius #3: What If the Machine Is Better?

The question came near the end of the panel that I was on in the second day of the 2nd Annual Conference on Credit Ratings in Mauritius. I am paraphrasing, but it went roughly like this: given how quickly AI models are improving and how great artificial intelligence may become,

The Hierarchy of Evaluative Authority: Credit Rating Agencies and the Limits of Evaluative Autonomy

Executive Summary In the spring and summer of 2026, three of the world’s most consequential financial institutions found themselves on the receiving end of a contest usually reserved for the governments and companies they evaluate. On 22 April, twenty-three Republican state attorneys general wrote to Fitch, Moody’s

Who Decides What Creditworthiness Means?

Executive Summary Pedro Lange Machado’s 2026 paper argues that sovereign credit rating agencies embed a market-liberal theory of the state into the technical apparatus of creditworthiness, rewarding fiscal restraint and creditor protection while penalising the debt restructuring and public investment that climate adaptation requires. This essay accepts that

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