Kenya's Mudavadi and Mbadi Back New Financing Framework to Cut African Union's Reliance on Donors

NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenya's Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi and Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi have backed a new financing framework designed to reduce the African Union's dependence on external donors and strengthen the 55-member bloc's financial independence.

The two cabinet secretaries, who serve in President William Ruto's government, endorsed the plan in Nairobi as the continental body confronts a budget structure in which the majority of its programme spending has long been financed by external partners, among them the European Union, the United States and China. The pressure on that model has sharpened since 2025, when the United States dismantled its principal foreign aid apparatus, and as several European donors have curtailed overseas spending.

Mudavadi occupies an office created after Kenya's 2022 elections to coordinate government business, while Mbadi runs the treasury of one of East Africa's largest economies, giving the endorsement both political and fiscal weight. The African Union is headquartered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The self-financing drive has a decade-long paper trail. At a summit in Kigali, Rwanda, in July 2016, AU heads of state committed member countries to a 0.2 percent levy on eligible imports, collected at national level by customs authorities, with the aim of financing 100 percent of the union's operational budget, 75 percent of its programme budget and 25 percent of its peace support budget from member-state contributions by 2020. The deadline passed without the targets being met, and remittance of the levy has been uneven across the membership.

The dependence is most acute in peace and security, the union's costliest line of work. The African Union's peace support operation in Somalia, which took over from an earlier African Union transition mission at the start of 2025, has been financed overwhelmingly from outside the continent, with the European Union historically paying troop allowances, an arrangement that has tied the bloc's missions to the budget cycles and political priorities of non-African governments. The framework endorsed by Mudavadi and Mbadi is aimed at reducing that exposure.

For any levy-based model, Kenya's customs machinery matters. The treasury that Mbadi leads collects import duties through the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa, one of the busiest gateways in East and Central Africa, and compliance by larger economies with union contribution schedules has been a recurring point of contention at AU budget sessions.

Financial autonomy is also written into the union's long-term planning. Agenda 2063, the African Union's development blueprint adopted in 2015, foresees the eventual establishment of three pan-African financial institutions: the African Investment Bank, the African Monetary Fund and the African Central Bank, bodies first provided for as far back as the 1991 Abuja Treaty. Progress on all three has been slow.

The next test comes through the union's own calendar. The AU Assembly, the summit of heads of state and government, convenes each February in Addis Ababa, where financing questions, including member-state arrears and shortfalls in levy remittances, have repeatedly featured on the agenda. Kenya, through Mudavadi and Mbadi, has now placed itself among the early backers of the new framework ahead of that gathering.