The Africa Circular Economy Facility, a multi-donor trust fund administered by the African Development Bank Group, is expanding into eight additional countries under its National Roadmaps for the Circular Economy programme, doubling down on a strategy that positions circularity not as environmental policy but as economic transformation.
Angola, Liberia, Madagascar and Senegal will now develop their own national circular economy roadmaps, identifying priority sectors, aligning institutional efforts and tailoring strategic guidelines to their local productive structures.
Simultaneously, Benin, Chad, Ethiopia and Mauritius are moving into the implementation phase, translating existing government frameworks into actionable policies, funded programmes and sustainable institutional capacity.
The expansion responds to a financing challenge of staggering scale.
“The continent faces an annual development financing gap of more than $400 billion,” said Anthony Nyong, Director of the Climate Change and Green Growth Department at the African Development Bank Group. “Roadmaps for the circular economy can help countries strengthen their domestic productive capacities and turn their priorities into investment opportunities.”
The economic logic driving the programme centres on a persistent structural weakness across African economies which is the continued export of vast quantities of natural resources in unprocessed form, a pattern that stalls industrialisation and limits local job creation.
The circular economy model directly targets that value leakage, retaining resources and their productive potential within national economies rather than shipping raw materials abroad for others to process and profit from.
The approach aligns with the African Development Bank Group’s Four Cardinal Points strategic vision and the New African Financial Architecture for Development, an initiative aimed at mobilising more African capital, strengthening the continent’s financial markets and financing large-scale transformation to drive employment, business growth and local value creation.
Results from the programme’s first cohort including Benin, Cameroon, Chad and Ethiopia offer an early proof of concept. Their roadmaps identified priority sectors spanning construction, forestry, agriculture, plastics, textiles, manufacturing, energy and water management, sectors chosen for their capacity to absorb circular economy interventions at scale.
Chad’s roadmap targets the creation of more than 25,000 green jobs and a 40% reduction in non-recycled waste by 2035, spread across six priority sectors.
“Far from being a luxury, this initiative is a vital necessity for Chad’s future,” said Hassan Bakhit Djamous, Chad’s Minister of the Environment. “It paves the way for us to diversify an economy that is still heavily dependent on oil.”
Benin’s Circular Economy Action Plan, launched in February 2026, sets equally ambitious 10-year targets, a 25% recycling rate, full collection of municipal waste and the establishment of 300 circular economy businesses.
The roadmaps function as structural investment frameworks, allowing governments and investors to pinpoint the sectors where circular solutions generate the greatest value, organise the actions required for deployment and define the governance mechanisms needed to sustain them over time.
The Africa Circular Economy Facility also finances the African Circular Economy Alliance, providing the technical assistance needed to build an enabling policy and institutional environment across participating countries.
The stated goal is to shift Africa’s circular economy transformation from ambition into action, turning waste-management and resource-processing gaps into investable, job-generating sectors rather than treating them as sustainability afterthoughts.
The programme’s expansion arrives as African governments face mounting pressure to diversify economies still heavily reliant on raw commodity exports, a dependency that leaves national budgets exposed to volatile global commodity prices and limits the continent’s ability to capture the full value of its own resources.
By embedding circularity into national investment planning rather than treating it as a standalone environmental initiative, the Bank Group is betting that resource efficiency can become a mainstream lever for industrialisation across the continent’s next wave of economic development.
