The African Development Bank (AfDB) recently published its flagship annual report, the African Economic Outlook 2020, in time for the African Union Summit of Heads of State, where it testified to the promising rate of growth by African countries as well as challenges such as economic inequality. Tamrat G. Giorgis, Fortune's managing editor, sat down with Akinwumi Adesina (PhD), president of the half-century-old Bank to opine on new opportunities for employment, income inequality, debt structure and how GDP is not edible.

Fortune: How much of that injection of new capital worth 115 billion dollars into the AfDB, doubling the Bank’s capital base, will shift the bank from its traditional focus on financing infrastructure in Africa into private sector support or other areas that are crucial for the economy of Africa?

Akinwumi Adesina: I am very delighted with the tremendous increase in the capital of the Bank. Our shareholders expressed tremendous confidence in us. The capital increase of the Bank went from 93 billion dollars to 208 billion dollars. It is the largest increase in capital since the bank was established in 1964. I am delighted by that.

I am also delighted for African countries. But it is not just the capital of the Bank itself. We also have a concessional arm of the Bank called the African Development Fund that allows us to invest in low-income countries and fragile states. We replenish it every three years. It was replenished in December of last year with a total amount of 7.6 billion dollars, which is an increase of 32pc compared with what we used to have.

Q: Any change in focus or priority for years to come?

We are not going to do more new things. We are just going to do more of what we have been doing best. And those areas have been set. It is called the "high-fives" of the Bank. It is about helping to light up and power Africa; to feed Africa; to industrialise Africa; to integrate Africa and to improve the quality of life for the people of Africa.

In the last four years, we have been able to finance and to connect 18 million people to electricity. That is massive. And we’ve been able to provide access for 140 million people to [utilise] agricultural technologies for enhanced food security. That is incredible. We have given 13 million people access to finance, most of those actually small and middle-sized enterprises.

Through our investment in infrastructure, we have 101 million people with access to transport. When you take water and sanitation, which is important for the quality of life, we provide 16 million people with access to water and sanitation. Those are all the things we are going to do more of.

Now, the exciting critical projects that are going be landmarks as you look down the next three, four or five years, the first one is going to be in energy. It is going to be in the Sahara. It is called the “Desert to Power,” which is across 11 countries. That will provide 250 million people with access to electricity, and 90 million of those are going to be off-grid.

The second one you are going to see us spend a lot of money on is the empowerment of women. I launched the initiative called “Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa”, to help mobilise three billion dollars of financing only for businesses of women.

The other one is going to be on youth. We’re going to spend a tremendous amount of money on the youth, because I do not believe that the youth are the future of Africa. They are the present of Africa. They need to have access to finance. We have started talking about how we will help establish what is called Youth Entrepreneurship Investment Banks that are going to be banks supporting or working for young people in the continent.

Of course, we will continue to invest in infrastructure. You cannot have development without infrastructure. You need rail, ports, ICT infrastructure. These are bread and butter stuff for us, which we do every time and we will continue to do. Especially, given that the African Continental Free Trade Area, which has opened tremendous opportunities for Africa. All of that just to say that we have quantum capital. We will continue to do more of what we are doing but at a greater scale. We will identify some of the areas that are going to be landmarked going forward. We are all set.

Q: The goal is to bring economic growth to Africa and somehow lift people from poverty. Largely, this is being measured by gross domestic product (GDP). Last week, you said in a statement that “you can’t eat GDP”. But what else do you have other than GDP to measure an economy?

It is not about what you measure. GDP is the standard thing that we use in economies to measure growth. When you say that you are growing and that is okay … but people do not eat it.

If I say GDP per capita is 15,000 dollars, what does that mean for you? Are you going to take that to the bank and use it as security to get a loan?

We have got to look beyond the numbers. We have got to look at what they mean in the lives of people. You want to make sure that it is not just good numbers that we are talking about. It is how many people have access to health, to water and sanitation, how many young people are getting jobs.

How are you going to make sure that the quality of life is going up?

That is what really matters. Growth is only meaningful to the extent to which it impacts the lives of people. That is my point, and I will continue to make that point. Growth must be inclusive, but growth must be at a faster level. Africa is doing well; do not get me wrong.

If you take a look at our growth projections for this year: it is about 3.9pc and next year is about 4.1pc. But we need to go double-digit so that you have a quantum growth that can actually lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. And we must make sure that the growth is targeted.

Take a look at rural areas in Africa, where we are investing as AfDB. We are investing for over 10 years, 25 billion dollars in agriculture. Why? Because 75pc of the poor are actually living in rural areas. We want to make sure that we turn agriculture into a big business that works for them, not just for the big guys. We want to help. African countries develop special agro-industrial processing zones. Whether you are processing tea, coffee or cocoa, you will add value to it, because you will have the infrastructure in rural areas that allows food and agro-businesses to process and add value to food.

That will create new results of economic prosperity that the youth and the poor in the rural areas will have their [quality of] life go up significantly.

Q: The AfDB has a growing concern of inequality in Africa. If that is the case, are you not alarmed by the impact of liberalisation in African economies that the Bank itself is advocating?

The issue of inequality will always continue to be very important. How you share resources is really going to determine who benefits from growth. How do women benefit from growth if they do not have access, for example, to property rights, access to land? How do young people benefit from growth if they do not have financial ecosystems that allow them to have the finance they need to turn their ideas into real businesses? Those are the real issues.

I grew out of poverty. For me, poverty is not theoretical at all. You talk about Gini Coefficients; I was part of those people they used to measure. We have got to be practical. We have got to make sure that we are doing things that impact the lives of people. And that is what the AfDB continues to do.

Let us even take the case of what it means in terms of economies-to-economies. Look at some other countries that are growing today; you have countries that are doing so well. Rwanda is at about 8.2pc. You look at Tanzania, Ethiopia, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire. These are some of the top-performing countries that we have.

But what happens to the fragile countries? What happens to the smaller states like Mali and Niger? Because they are landlocked countries and they are facing fragility, which actually makes their growth recede. We have got to make sure that growth is not just total growth but also inclusive growth. On this, I think Africa is actually doing well according to the numbers that we have. If you look at the growth number, yes 3.9pc is what we see for the continent for this year. But do not forget 20 countries in Africa are growing at three percent to five percent and 20 countries above five percent. We just have to make sure that growth is more even. Even across regions and countries.

Q: When it comes to the best performers in Africa, their growth is driven by public expenditure that is largely financed by loans from the likes of China. But you do not seem too worried about the prospect of a debt crisis. Why?

Why do I have to worry when we do not have a crisis? If you look at the mean debt-to-GDP ratio of Africa by 2018, it is about 56pc. Yes, it has gone up from roughly about 38pc from where it used to be in 10 years. But do not forget that the debt-to-GDP ratio of Africa today is still within the manageable level, almost at about 34pc. We do not have a systemic debt problem in Africa. We do have particular countries that are over-extended in terms of debt. And so, they may be at risk of debt distress.

Q: Does that include Ethiopia?

It is one of the countries that I admire the most. Ethiopia’s economic growth has constantly been very high over more than 15 years. The question you have to ask yourself is, why? Ethiopia takes debt, but Ethiopia is not taking debt for consumption.

You have got two kinds of debt that you can take. If you have a credit card, you can go take your credit card and buy hamburgers. That is one kind of debt. Call it "hamburger debt". You take the second credit card and you invest in real estate. Now, are they the same kind of debt? The quality of debt matters. What are you spending the debt on?

If you are taking debt to invest in quality infrastructure that is going to allow you to unlock growth and income streams in the future, that is good debt. But if you are taking debt to pay for economic expenditure, that is what I call "hamburger debt".