Development Financing under Constraints: A Decade of African Development Bank. By Ime Ekop Ebong. Bonn-Bad Godesberg: Verlag Neue Sesellschaft GmbH. 1974. 172 pp.(special Issue No. 8 of the Vierteljahresberichte.)

Development Financing under Constraints, as the author himself puts it, is ‘aimed to recapitulate the spirit in which the African Development Bank was founded, describe how it later functioned and why it functioned the way it did’. The study is an excellent attempt to highlight economic cooperation and integration and to discuss its rationale in view of the given constraints. The main idea behind the establishment of an institution, like the African Development Bank (ADB), was necessarily an ‘all-African Investment Bank’ to promote development projects. The newly independent nations of Africa, lacking as they are in the basic infrastructure, are beset with difficulties in surviving as economically viable units. As such, the need for a pooling of resources and for technical know-how is particularly imperative