The African Peer Review Mechanism is pressing member states to close a governance gap that has left roughly 20 African countries without a sovereign credit rating, even as the continent sits on an estimated $4 trillion in untapped domestic capital. Ambassador Marie-Antoinette Rose Quatre, Chief Executive Officer of the APRM Continental Secretariat, framed the problem in institutional terms in an interview with Africa Renewal’s John Sebesta: the machinery of assessment exists, but many governments have yet to submit themselves to it, and the cost of that reluctance is measured in higher borrowing costs and weaker debt governance.
Rose Quatre, who took up her post in November 2024, spoke days after the launch, on 7 October 2026, of the Africa Credit Rating Agency (AfCRA), an independent institution designed to deliver credible and fair assessments of the creditworthiness of African countries, sub-sovereigns and corporations. She was careful to position AfCRA as one strand of a broader institutional project rather than an end in itself. “The work of APRM is not just focused on AfCRA,” she said, describing parallel efforts to ensure that international rating agencies operating on the continent understand the mechanism’s work and can support member states in improving their ratings.
The numbers she cited tell a story of slow institutional uptake. Speaking at the Africa Annual Credit Ratings Conference in May 2025, she noted that some 22 African countries, nearly 40 per cent of the continent, lacked a sovereign credit rating. A year on, she sees little movement in that count. What has shifted, she argued, is preparedness: certain countries have secured ratings upgrades, a sign that those ready to be assessed are now better equipped. The APRM’s post-launch task, in her words, is to work with the 20-odd unrated states so that they understand what assessment requires.
For Rose Quatre, ratings and debt governance are inseparable. A positive rating, she explained, signals that a country, sub-sovereign or corporation can service its obligations, and that is the ultimate objective. The obstacle lies in risk perceptions that force African borrowers to service debt at excessively high interest rates. She pointed to a paradox: the continent is poorly rated in many places while holding $4 trillion in domestic capital across central banks, pension funds and social security funds. Deployed as investment, she argued, that capital could transform Africa within five to ten years.
The mechanism itself carries a distinctive accountability design. Born 23 years ago out of NEPAD, the development agency of the African Union, the APRM was created so that Heads of State could review one another on governance and democracy. Each year, on the margins of the AU Summit, member states engage in what Rose Quatre described as frank exchanges. Its mandate rests on six pillars: democratic and political governance; economic governance and management; socio-economic governance; corporate governance; resilience to external shocks, added after the COVID-19 crisis; and e-governance, introduced at her urging when she joined two years ago.
Her assessment of continental trends is candid. Democracy and governance, she said, have stagnated, a drag on progress toward both Agenda 2030 and Agenda 2063, and one compounded by a fluid technological and artificial intelligence landscape in which citizens increasingly demand participation. By contrast, she sees gains in economic governance, corporate governance and social development in some countries, but insists such progress cannot be sustained without sound political governance anchoring it.
The APRM’s collaboration with the United Nations speaks to that institutional focus. A meeting last year on adaptive governance and sustainable development drew principals from UNDESA, the UN Office of the Special Adviser on Africa, UNDP and the UN Economic Commission for Africa. The mechanism also prepares member states for Voluntary National Reviews on the Sustainable Development Goals, and has trained more than 400 public servants over four years under the principles of the Committee of Experts on Public Administration. Institutions, in her view, are what matter most in governance: independent bodies and strong public servants, now supplemented by e-governance to improve delivery.
Under her leadership, the APRM is moving from diagnosis to execution. A new Governance Support Programme, due to launch next year, will pool resources and capacities to implement the mechanism’s recommendations. Her vision for the coming five to ten years is deliberately pragmatic: leadership with the capacity and the will to deliver for African citizens, and a recognition of the duty of care owed to them.
That duty extends to the continent’s youth, who make up 70 per cent of the population under the age of 35. Rose Quatre rejects the familiar label of a youth dividend. It becomes a dividend only when governments invest, she said, warning that failure to do so would turn the demographic reality into a peace and security crisis. Investment, in her account, starts with basics such as electricity, water, food security and sanitation, then extends to education systems she says were inherited and built for others rather than for Africans, to health systems capable of keeping a young population productive, and to megacities where concentrated populations without employment or opportunity fuel crime and violence.
Her bottom line is institutional: the money exists, the frameworks exist, and what remains is the political will to unlock them. Whether the 20 unrated states now answer the APRM’s call may be the real test of the mechanism’s next decade.