SUMMER JOURNAL

The Chief of Staff, Volume 8

A UN moderator watches a panel in Addis Ababa converge on one diagnosis: Africa's development problem is not capital but a broken, unowned system. His insight: chiefs of staff, as internal integrators, may be the ones to hold coherence, beginning at home.

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The Unowned Problem

Aboubakri DIAWWhat a panel discussion in Addis Ababa revealed about fragmentation, development finance, and why integration must begin at home.The Africa Hall in Addis Ababa carries history in its walls. It’s where the African Union was born and where leaders gathered in 1963 to imagine a continent differently. When I walked in one morning for a plenary, the room held it all: screens and lights; ministers and heads of institutions in the front rows; staff members, students and interns along the edges; the energy of a space that believes something important is about to happen. I noticed it immediately: expectation; the quiet conviction, shared by almost everyone present, that by the time we left, something would begin to change.I was moderating a panel. This meant my job was to find the thread that connected the head of a global development system, senior executives from development finance institutions, a young entrepreneur from Tanzania, an equity investor from Nigeria, and the voice of the African private sector. It was, I have come to understand, not entirely unlike what a chief of staff does every day: holding coherence across a room full of people, who each see part of the picture, without anyone being formally responsible for the whole. The thread, when it emerged, was not one anyone had anticipated.The panel had been convened around a familiar question: how does Africa close the gap between capital and development outcomes that remain out of reach? It is a question the continent has been asking for decades. Development finance institutions have refined their answers, governments have announced frameworks, and continental bodies have produced strategies. And yet the gap persists. Not, I have come to believe, because the answers are wrong, but because the question is incomplete.About halfway through the discussion, a senior executive from the Development Finance Institution (DFI) said something that stopped the room. He had been speaking about the obstacles to financing cross-border industrial projects: the fragmented regulations; the misaligned fiscal regimes; and the endless certification requirements on either side of borders that should, by now, be more porous. And then he said, plainly, that removing these obstacles was not the work of banks. Banks could move money, but addressing the deeper problem required someone else. He looked, in that moment, toward the continental institutions and organisations like the one I represent, the United Nations.The room was quiet for a few seconds. I looked across at the equity investor; the former emergency healthcare entrepreneur from Nigeria; and the young entrepreneur from Tanzania who had spent a decade building a cashew processing business. I saw the same thing in their eyes that I was feeling. Not surprise exactly, but the specific weight of a truth, that had been circling the conversation, finally landing. If the institutions designed to move capital were redirecting the problem back to coordination and the system, then what exactly were we waiting for? And who, in that room, was responsible for the system?F had told his story earlier. Tanzania is the fourth largest producer of cashew nuts in the world. Only around ten per cent of that harvest is processed domestically. The rest travels abroad to be shelled, valued and sold back. When F decided to build a processing facility, he could not find local financing. After years of trying, he secured it from a European Bank. They listened and structured something that fitted his actual situation, rather than asking F to fit a template designed for a different kind of business in a different kind of economy.It took F ten years to finally access local capital.When I heard that, I did not think about financing instruments or blended capital structures, I thought about patience and the particular kind of resilience it takes to wait a decade for a system to catch up with your idea. Then I thought about all the young people across the continent whom we encourage into entrepreneurship, whom we tell to be bold, to build and to take risks. F had his opportunity with a European bank, but not all of them will. Not all of them have ten years. The patience that Africa’s entrepreneurs needed, their own financial system could not provide. A Dutch bank had to step in. 
This is not a financing gap, a relationship gap, a delivery gap, or a shortage of capital. It’s a failure to build the models, the patience, and the relational trust that would put capital in service of African entrepreneurs on their own terms. 
The African banks were not incapable of helping F, they were simply not designed for this.OB identified a different face to the same problem. Almost all financing conversations in Africa are about debt, loans, bonds, guarantees or credit facilities. Debt says: prove yourself first, then I will support you. Equity says: I will grow with You, take the risk alongside you, and stay through the difficult years. The equity layer—the capital that remains for three, four, five years, that sits on your board, that helps you navigate the decisions that determine whether a firm scales or stagnates—is almost entirely absent from Africa’s financial architecture. Without it, a pattern holds: firms stay small, do not scale, and disappear with their founders. An Economist article once described African businesses as unemployment in disguise. [1] That is, ventures which sustain their owners rarely become the engines of employment and wealth creation that transform economies. This is not a story about insufficient financing. It’s a story about the wrong kind of financing, arriving too late and structured for the wrong purpose.And then there was the image from AA, which has not left me since, of women in Zambia working in gemstone mining, discarding rocks they did not know were valuable. A foreign buyer arrives each week to collect what they call rubbish, paying the equivalent of a dollar and a half per bucket for material worth thousands when processed.And the cocoa that leaves Africa valued at around ten billion dollars returning as part of a global chocolate industry worth more than two hundred billion. [2] The shea butter, the leather, the cashews, all of them travelling out of the continent raw, and coming back as someone else’s margin. [3]
This is delivery failure in its most visible form. Africa is not failing to produce. It is failing to capture what it produces. The extraction works perfectly but integration does not exist.
Three voices. Three angles. One diagnosis. The constraint is not capital but the system that should, and does not, connect capital to enterprise, enterprise to knowledge, knowledge to policy, and policy to results. As every speaker on that panel converged on coordination, collaboration, and information as their closing message, I noticed something which I have been turning over ever since: nobody claimed ownership. Everyone agreed on what was missing. Nobody said: that is my job.I understand why. Because the harder truth, the one that sits beneath every conversation about external alignment, is this: fragmentation does not begin between institutions. It begins inside them.I see it every day. Divisions that do not speak to departments. Departments that do not speak to sections. Units running parallel workstreams toward the same objective without knowing it, or worse, working against each other without knowing it. The silos are not only between the development finance institution and the ministry, between the continental body and the national government, or between the private sector and the regulator. They are within each of those institutions, running vertically and horizontally, quietly undermining every effort to present a coherent face to the outside world.This matters enormously for what happened in Africa Hall. When F described ten years of waiting for a system to see him, he was not only describing a failure of external coordination between banks and entrepreneurs. He was describing the cumulative effect of internal fragmentation across every institution that should have connected him to what he needed, and did not, because each piece of the system was optimising for its own mandate rather than for the outcome his business represented. When the DFI executive redirected the problem toward continental institutions, he was right. But the continental institutions he was gesturing towards are themselves collections of competing divisions, each with its own reporting lines, its own incentives, its own definition of success. You cannot align what you have not first integrated.This is where I believe chiefs of staff have a role that has not yet been fully named, and a responsibility that extends beyond the boundaries of their own organisations.We are, at our best, internal integrators. We sit close to leadership. We see across divisions. We hold the thread between strategy and execution, between what was decided and what is actually happening, between what an institution says it stands for and what it does on a Tuesday afternoon. That proximity—that line of sight across the whole—is the thing that makes the role valuable. It is also the thing that makes it demanding, because the forces of fragmentation are not passive, they are active. Divisions protect their mandates. Departments guard their processes. The invisible forces that integrators push against are not laziness or bad faith. They are the accumulated logic of institutions that were built to specialise not to synthesise.But what that morning in the Africa Hall clarified for me is that the internal work is not only valuable in itself, it is the precondition for everything else. If our own institutions remain fragmented behind the face we present to partners, then we have nothing reliable to offer the external alignment conversation. 
A chief of staff who has not achieved coherence inside cannot credibly advocate for coherence outside. Integration must begin at home.
And yet—and this is the thought I could not shake on my way home that evening—the chiefs of staff I know across multilateral institutions, development banks, government offices, and private sector organisations are each, in their own corners, pushing against this same invisible force. We are doing it separately. We are not, in any meaningful sense, doing it together.The question I did not ask in that room—the one I held back because the moment was not right, because the relationship mattered more than the point, because sometimes the chief of staff’s most important judgement is knowing what not to say and when—is this: what are you willing to sacrifice, as an institution, to address the fragmentation we all just described?I still do not have the answer, and I think this points toward a conversation that the profession has not yet seriously had: what would it look like if the integrators collaborated? Not the institutions. The integrators. The people whose job it is to hold coherence inside their respective organisations, connecting with each other across organisational lines to build the alignment that no single institution can manufacture alone. Not a new body, not a new framework, not another high-level panel. A network of people who understand, from the inside, what fragmentation actually costs and who have both the proximity to leadership and the cross-institutional relationships to begin dismantling it.A speaker on an earlier panel that morning had said, simply: the system is broken. He was not wrong. But sitting in that room watching a development banker, cashew farmer, equity investor, and trade economist, all converge on the same diagnosis without anyone claiming ownership of the solution, I found myself thinking something slightly different.
The system is not only broken. It is unowned. Everyone is doing their part, but no one feels responsible for the connection between them.
That gap between the diagnosis everyone shares and the ownership nobody takes is precisely where chiefs of staff sit. It is uncomfortable territory. It comes without a formal mandate, without the authority to compel, and without the guarantee that the effort will be recognised. But it is also, I would argue, the most important territory in the system right now. Not because chiefs of staff have all the answers. But because the work of holding coherence—inside first, and then across—is work that will not happen unless someone decides it is their responsibility.Let us fix it. But let us begin where we have authority, inside our own houses, before we reach beyond them.

Biography

Aboubakri DIAW has over twenty years of experience in programme management, development planning and leadership. Before joining the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), he served in several senior roles across the UN system, including Head of the Development Pillar at UNAMA in Afghanistan; Head of the Resident Coordinator’s Office in the Democratic Republic of Congo; Chief of Staff at the UN Mine Action Service (UNMAS); and Chief of Operations and Planning for UNAIDS in West and Central Africa. Prior to his UN career, Mr Diaw spent five years as a Project Manager with the international NGO Caritas Internationalis and holds a PhD in Integrating Frontier Technologies: Enhancing Efficiency and Impact in the UN’s Response to Global Challenges.

References

[1] ‘Africa has too many businesses, too little business: being your own boss is not the best strategy’, The Economist (The Economist Group, January 6, 2025).[2] ‘Global cocoa industry worth $200b’, The Nation (Vintage Press Limited, Nigeria, January 4, 2024).[3] Mang'ana, Kulwa and Ngaiza, Revelian and Paul, Michael. ‘A Golden Opportunity Ripe for the Picking: Tanzania's Cashew Nut Industry’, SSRN (Elsevier, June 29, 2024).

From the desk of the CEO

Since 2021, The Chief of Staff has given our global network a platform to explore the role from every angle. The latest issue, 'The Unowned Problem', continues that work.There is a question running beneath every article in this issue, and it is not a comfortable one. When something is broken, and everyone in the room can see it, who decides it is their responsibility to fix it?Our contributors approach that question from different angles. Some write from the front lines of organisational complexity: utilities in Saudi Arabia, mining operations, the upper ranks of US government departments. Others write from inside transformation, doing the human work of modernising organisations built for a slower pace of change. What connects them is a shared belief. The chief of staff is not a supporting role in these moments. Increasingly, it is the role progress depends on.As Editorial Manager Henry Martin writes in his introduction, the essays within offer something for every reader. Something to identify with, disagree with, reflect upon, or raise with your colleagues and the principal alongside whom you work.We hope you enjoy this issue and carry the conversation forward.Trent Smyth AM
Chief Executive Officer
The Chief of Staff Association

The Chief of Staff, Volume 8

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