The two Operations departments together constitute the principal vehicle for developing and supervising the implementation of projects and programs in the Foundation’s portfolio. They contribute to efforts aimed at ensuring that the Foundation aligns its actions with national or regional priorities and coordinates its initiatives with those of other partners on the ground. They also play a critical role in distilling best practices and mainstreaming them into the Foundation-supported capacity building interventions to ensure maximum impact on development efforts and reform processes initiated by countries on regional organizations.

The operations of the Foundations are based on four major principles, namely:

• Centrality of capacity to the development process in Africa
• Critical role of a partnership and demand-driven approach in addressing the capacity problems.
• African ownership and leadership in the capacity building process.
• A systematic, sequenced and coordinated approach to the capacity building process.

The Foundation encourages and supports countries in undertaking rigorous policy analysis and research, as well as designing sound public programs in order to generate sensible development policies and nurture a policy environment that is friendly to intervention in capacity building, private sector development and sustainable long-term growth and development with poverty reduction.  ACBF puts a growing emphasis on the need to strengthen the capacity of the core public sector, so that it can implement policies, deliver public programs in an effective, transparent and accountable manner, and to empower non-state actors to demand responsiveness and results from public service institutions.  The approach to capacity building is largely demand-driven with emphasis on needs assessment, stakeholders’ ownership, project sustainability, and complementarity of intervention across projects, programs and development funding institutions. Considerable emphasis is placed on the promotion of gender equity in the Foundation’s funding support to national and regional development process.  Indeed, interventions in the capacity-building process are being used to address the systemic obstacles of women’s participation in the policy-making process in countries where projects and programs are being supported.

The Operations department for Western & Central Africa covers the following countries:-
Benin,  Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Republic of Congo, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo