Africa is not asking for capital. It is asking to be taken seriously.
By Ana Guzmán Quintana
During his recent visit to Spain, Pope Leo XIV was throwing flowers into the sea at the Arguineguín pier to remember those who never made it to the Canary Islands, and he urged Europe to stop “getting used to the Atlantic being a cemetery without gravestones.” These words and this gesture resonated with us particularly strongly, as we had just spent two days in Barcelona listening to those working in the opposite direction: not on managing departures from Africa, but on building the conditions that make staying economically meaningful.
The Capital with Purpose event, organized by IESE together with Oryx Impact, an impact manager specialized in African private capital, brought together a large number of investors, entrepreneurs, and people from around the world committed to impact and determined to explore how private capital can be directed toward the African continent. It was a technical, in-depth conversation and, at several moments, uncomfortable in the best possible way.
Africa represents less than 1% of global institutional capital, despite accounting for 60% of the planet’s uncultivated arable land, holding critical reserves for the energy transition, and having a demographic profile that by 2050 will boast a workforce larger than those of China and India combined. In 2025, it was the only region in the world to record growth in private equity deal volume: 530 transactions, 8% more than the previous year, while the rest of the world declined.
And yet, Official Development Assistance (ODA) fell by 51% in 2025, and foreign direct investment dropped by 39%. Development Finance Institutions still account for nearly two-thirds of all African private capital fundraising commitments. An ecosystem that should be diversifying its sources of capital remains structurally dependent on the same actors as always.
The CEO of the BRVM (the Regional Stock Exchange of West Africa) put it with inescapable precision: Africa does not suffer from a capital deficit. It has more than $4 trillion in local assets under management. What it lacks are credible, liquid, transparent, and interconnected investment platforms. That distinction matters because a capital deficit can be solved with more external money, whereas a financial infrastructure deficit can only be solved by building from within.
During the event, Oryx Impact presented an analysis of its screening process covering more than 1,300 African investment vehicles tracked over five years. Of these funds, only 3.2% reached the deep-dive analysis stage. So far, nothing surprising—more or less the same thing happens to us. What is revealing, however, is the pattern of rejections: in advanced stages, the two determining filters are experience and consistency between the impact thesis and financial execution. Not fund size, nor the manager’s background.
And here lies the tension that no one fully resolved: 62% of impact fund managers in Africa are emerging managers, many of them first-generation. The best documented returns belong to vehicles that had deployed barely $1 million. The patient capital needed to determine whether those returns can be replicated at greater scale rarely arrives. The ecosystem is producing extraordinary managers who cannot grow because international institutional investors demand the kind of track record that can only be built with the very capital that is not arriving. It is a cycle that the impact sector should be far more urgent about breaking.
African pension funds hold more than $2 trillion in assets, yet more than 50% is invested in short-term government debt—not because of a lack of willingness, but because of the absence of appropriately rated instruments and credit-enhancement mechanisms.
The case of InfraCredit in Nigeria illustrates what happens when the right bridge is built. A local-currency guarantee facility for infrastructure corporate bonds enabled those instruments to achieve investment-grade ratings compatible with the regulatory requirements of local pension funds. The result: infrastructure allocations increased from $6 million to nearly $200 million in less than a decade. Without any new inflow of foreign capital. Using capital that already existed, unlocked through the right instrument. It is a lesson in intermediation that the sector should study more closely than it usually does.
While investment declined sharply in 2025, as we have mentioned, remittances from the African diaspora grew by 15%, reaching $120 billion. It was the only source of external capital that increased. And it is capital without conditionalities, capital that understands the local context better than any external analyst. At the same time, Dealroom data show that African fundraising has followed a sustained upward trajectory since 2022, in contrast to the decline in North American capital over the same period. The localization of capital is already happening. The question is whether international investors will accompany that process or arrive too late.
Purpose-driven capital is not the capital that arrives with good intentions. It is the capital that arrives with structural humility. That has practical consequences: in our analysis of African markets, we cannot apply the same experience criteria used to evaluate a third-generation European fund, because that standard systematically excludes the best emerging managers before they have the opportunity to prove themselves. Supporting the construction of local market infrastructure should be part of the impact mandate, not a prerequisite for investment.
The Regional Stock Exchange accumulated a 99% return between 2021 and 2025 and offers a fixed CFA/euro parity that eliminates currency risk for European investors, and it has been operating for nearly thirty years. Yet it remains invisible to most institutional managers on the continent. The gap is not one of performance… it is one of attention.
Africa has the capital, the talent, the demographics and, according to all the data presented in Barcelona, the momentum. What it needs is for international investors to stop designing top-down solutions and start building capacity from within: co-investing with local managers, supporting the professionalization of emerging vehicles, and accepting that leadership in the next phase of African development will not come from Geneva or Amsterdam.
There are managers in Nairobi, Lagos, and Abidjan building investment theses that are more sophisticated and more grounded in the realities of their markets than many of the vehicles circulating through Europe’s impact-investing circuits. The question we should be asking is not whether Africa is ready. It is whether we are.