 My name is Akim Umi Adishina, President of the African Development Bank. I'm here in the United States to discuss how to further strengthen our partnership between U.S. and Africa, and in particular to be here, I'm delighted at the Institute of Peace, talking about issues of global peace, peace in Africa, issues of conflict and how we can accelerate development by making sure we have durable peace. The African Development Bank was established in 1964. It is today Africa's premier financial institution. It's the only triple-A financial institution that you have in Africa. We couldn't have met all these needs if we didn't have huge capital for us to be able to do so. In 2019, our shareholders, including the United States with great support from the U.S., were able to actually get a capital of the bank increased. It went from $93 billion to $208 billion. So that gave us a firing power just in the right time that we needed to cope with many of the things that subsequently happened. In the case of the COVID-19 situation, it's had huge impacts on Africa. And of course, to rapidly support African countries to cope with that, the African Development Bank very quickly launched up to a $10 billion facility for COVID-19 response. Emergency facilities support the countries to get basic things, whether they are getting themselves personal protective equipment, whether they're, you know, upgrading hospitals, getting access to oxygen and all those things, or simply just getting money to just run their economies because all the economies were shut down. Another area where we supported is with the war, Russian and Ukraine war, which actually led to significant risks for Africa in terms of food security. Because, you know, Africa depended a lot on Russia and Ukraine for fertilizer, for maize and for wheat. And so what the African Development Bank found out was that if we didn't do something quickly, Africa was going to lose 30 million metric tons of wheat and maize from those two countries. We put in place a $1.5 billion emergency food production facility for Africa. You know, I'm a fine believer of the fact that, look, if you've got a sort of a problem, it's not about getting a bowl in hand and going begging for food. It's like, you know, get seed in those bowls and put seed in the ground and grow your own food. And so we put $1.5 billion there to do that. Today it is supporting 20 million farmers in Africa to produce 38 million metric tons of food, which is 8 million metric tons of food more than actually we're going to lose from Russia and Ukraine. The best way to actually reduce instability is to have wealth and make sure that wealth is equitable wealth and that a great part of the population can participate in that. You know, most people forget that. In fact, the farmers work, you know, account for 70% of Africa's population. It's the largest private sector we have. You know, farming is not something, it's not a developer activity. It's a private sector activity. So getting agriculture to work, it's very, very important to being able to get Africa's rural areas to move away from being perhaps today what I would call zones of economic misery because of high level of poverty to becoming zones of economic prosperity. And so one of the ways in which we're doing that as the African Development Bank is mobilizing resources around agriculture to structural change of our economies to make agriculture more competitive and also more of a wealth-creating sector, not just a development activity. Second one, of course, is foreign direct investment. It's very, very important. Well, to get investment in, you need energy, you know, and you need good infrastructure. You know, in the last seven years, the African Development Bank has invested well over $44 billion in infrastructure from ports to rail to digital infrastructure to power, for example, making sure that you can have that because companies got to run on energy. We realize that Africa today has what we call the Africa Continental Free Trade Area. It is the largest free trade zone now in the world in times of number of participating countries. And finally is, we as African Development Bank, we set up something called the Africa Investment Forum. That forum brings together investors around the world focusing on critical opportunities in Africa, but not just focusing on the opportunities, asking the question, what will it take for you to invest in Africa? I want investment landing in Africa like a plane landing on a smooth landing strip, right? So what are the risks that you face? Political risk, market risk, project risk, that's our job, is to make sure that we understand that we can reduce those risks working with others. And it's been tremendously successful so far.