On 15 February 2026, in Cairo, Nigeria’s Central Bank Governor, Olayemi Cardoso, sat down with his Egyptian counterpart, Hassan Abdalla, and the International Finance Corporation to push the conversation forward under Egypt’s 30by30 initiative.
The meeting hammered home a blunt truth: Africa’s financial future hinges on locking in both stability and sustainability at the same time.
Cardoso argued that credibility is where resilience begins. In Nigeria, tight, open reforms are shoring up the macro numbers and restoring trust in banks and capital markets— the starter kit for growth that lasts.
Yet stability on its own won’t cut it. Climate risk is already credit risk. Whether it’s sovereign downgrades or crop failures, weather patterns are rewriting economic scorecards across the continent. Baking climate considerations into supervision, capital rules and long-range planning is no longer optional.
By working more closely with the Central Bank of Egypt and the wider World Bank Group outfit, the CBN is bent on building a financial system that prices risk properly, ships more green finance across borders, and positions Africa to absorb shocks—and still grow.
CBN Deputy Governor for Economic Policy, Muhammad Sani Abdullahi, who travelled with Cardoso, also took part in a panel dissecting how regulators in emerging markets are rewriting the rulebook to manage climate-related threats.
