Paolo Angelini, Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank of Italy, took the podium in Palermo last month to deliver a pointed message to one of the continent's most important applied-research gatherings: Africa's path to lasting prosperity must be built on foundations of its own making. Speaking at the Africa Growth and Opportunity: Research in Action 2026 conference — known as AGORA 26 — on 26 October, Angelini anchored his remarks in a deceptively simple architectural metaphor. The "building sills" of his title were not decorative flourishes; they signalled a call for the structural, institutional, and intellectual groundwork that any durable development framework requires. The speech was subsequently published by the Bank for International Settlements on 3 November 2026, lending it wider institutional weight and distributing it to a global audience of central bankers, policymakers, and development economists.
The AGORA Platform and Its Stakes
AGORA 26 is not a typical diplomatic forum. Its full title — Africa Growth and Opportunity: Research in Action — signals a commitment to translating empirical work into actionable policy, bridging the often frustrating gap between academic insight and governmental implementation. That Palermo, a Mediterranean city with deep historical ties to North Africa and a long tradition of cross-cultural exchange, served as the venue was itself a statement of geographic intentionality. The choice positions European institutional actors not as distant observers of African economic trajectories, but as engaged interlocutors with a shared stake in the continent's development outcomes. For Angelini and the Bank of Italy, participation at this level reflects a broader conviction that European central banking institutions have a legitimate and constructive role to play in shaping the analytical conversation around African growth.
Home-Grown Development as a Policy Imperative
The concept of endogenous, or home-grown, development is not new in development economics, but its invocation by a senior European central banker at a research-focused African policy conference carries particular resonance in the current global moment. Decades of externally designed structural adjustment programmes, donor-conditioned lending frameworks, and imported governance models have produced mixed results across sub-Saharan and North African economies. The growing consensus — reflected in Angelini's framing — is that sustainable growth on the continent must emerge from within: from local institutional capacity, domestically mobilised capital, regionally integrated markets, and research ecosystems that generate knowledge relevant to African realities rather than replicated from external templates.
The "building sills" metaphor is worth dwelling on. In architecture, a sill is not the visible facade of a structure — it is the horizontal load-bearing element at the base of a window or door frame, the quiet infrastructure that allows everything above it to function. Applied to development policy, the metaphor argues for prioritising the unglamorous foundations: legal frameworks, data infrastructure, financial system depth, educational pipelines, and research capacity. These are rarely the headline items of international development summits, yet they are precisely the conditions without which more visible investments — in technology, in infrastructure mega-projects, in fintech ecosystems — cannot take lasting root.
The European Central Banking Perspective
Angelini's presence at AGORA 26 also speaks to the evolving role of European monetary institutions in Africa-focused policy dialogue. The Bank of Italy, as a member of the European Central Bank system and a longstanding BIS participant, brings a specific institutional lens: one shaped by the experience of building regulatory and supervisory frameworks within a diverse, multi-sovereign monetary union. That experience — however imperfect and contextually distinct — offers potentially transferable lessons for African regional integration efforts, including those unfolding under the African Continental Free Trade Area and various regional central banking cooperation initiatives.
At the same time, the speech's emphasis on home-grown solutions implicitly cautions against the wholesale transplantation of European models. The Bank of Italy's credibility in this space rests in part on its willingness to engage with the specificity of African institutional contexts rather than offering off-the-shelf prescriptions. Research, in this framing, is not merely academic output — it is a sovereignty-affirming tool, one that equips African policymakers with the evidence base to design interventions calibrated to their own political economies, demographic realities, and resource endowments.
What This Means for African Financial Policy
The significance of Angelini's address at AGORA 26, and the BIS's decision to publish and amplify it, lies in the signal it sends about where the centre of gravity in African development discourse is shifting. There is growing institutional recognition — from Rome to Basel — that the next chapter of African economic integration and growth will be written by African actors, drawing on African research, and implemented through African institutions. The role of external partners, including European central banks and multilateral bodies like the BIS, is increasingly understood as one of facilitation and intellectual partnership rather than prescription.
For practitioners in African fintech, banking, and financial regulation, this framing has direct operational implications. It suggests that the international regulatory and research community is likely to be more receptive than ever to African-led frameworks in areas such as digital payments infrastructure, central bank digital currency design, mobile financial services regulation, and cross-border settlement architecture. The building sills, in short, are being laid — and the question now is who holds the trowel.
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