On 13 September, BRICS members adopted the New Delhi Declaration, which, among many other points, reaffirms their commitment to sustainable economic development and places the New Development Bank (NDB) at the forefront of financial assistance to the Global South. The Declaration also calls on the NDB to expand its capacity to mobilise financial resources to meet the growing needs of emerging and developing markets. These are significant ambitions. The question, however, is how far the Bank’s current scale of operations matches them.
Following the New Delhi Declaration and BRICS’s commitment to sustainable economic development, this article briefly reviews publicly available information on the financing activities of the BRICS-established New Development Bank. Publicly available data on NDB financing provide an opportunity to examine what these ambitions look like in practice.
Before turning to the numbers, it is worth noting that several non-BRICS countries are members of the NDB, while not all BRICS countries are members of the Bank. Specifically, Ethiopia, Iran and Indonesia do not participate in the NDB. Non-BRICS members include Algeria, Bangladesh and Uzbekistan. This distinction is important when interpreting the geographical and institutional scope of the Bank’s activities, as the distribution of NDB projects does not directly correspond to BRICS membership.
Using publicly available project data, we examine the types of economic projects currently proposed by the NDB. In 2026, the NDB proposed 14 projects, comprising seven sovereign borrowing projects valued at $3 billion and seven non-sovereign projects valued at $1 billion. Project costs were denominated in only two currencies: USD and CNY. Geographically, the projects were concentrated in Asia and Africa, with six in India, three in South Africa, two in Bangladesh, two in China and one in Brazil.
In terms of thematic priorities, the primary focus is on energy and energy efficiency, as well as social and transport infrastructure. For example, the project in Brazil aims to improve climate resilience and electricity distribution in Rio Grande do Sul. Several projects in India target improvements to road and rail infrastructure in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Telangana.
Thematically, therefore, there appears to be broad consistency between the NDB’s proposed projects and BRICS’s stated emphasis on sustainable development. A more noticeable gap emerges, however, when looking at the scale and geographical reach of the Bank’s activities. Its current scale remains relatively modest in relation to the size of the economies and development needs it is expected to serve.
The geographical distribution of projects also appears to be tilted towards Asia, with India alone accounting for nearly half of the projects proposed in 2026, while other regions, such as Latin America and the Middle East, remain much less represented.
It is this gap between the stated ambitions and the current scale of the Bank’s activities that deserves particular attention. It raises questions about the extent to which the NDB currently functions as a global development finance institution, particularly when compared with the World Bank Group, which annually provides development financing worth just over $100 billion (2020 data).
The NDB clearly finances projects that correspond with the development objectives stated by BRICS. However, if it is to play a substantially greater role in financing development across the Global South — in line with the ambitions reiterated in New Delhi — thematic alignment alone may not be enough.
The overall scale of the Bank’s activities and its geographical reach currently appear too limited for it to constitute a major global alternative in development finance. If BRICS wants the NDB to play such a role, the Bank will need not only to mobilise more capital but also to broaden the geographical reach of its financing.
