Endalkachew Befekadu

YouTuber in Asmara hungry street kids begging for food 🥲and women feeling unsafe walking alone. @eri_id_

The most important shift in African investment isn't happening in New York, London, or Beijing. It's happening on the continent itself. For decades, African capital fled Africa. Wealthy individuals parked money in real estate in London or Dubai. Pension funds bought foreign government bonds. Sovereign wealth funds sat idle. That's changing — and @TheEconomist called it "probably the most crucial" reason to be optimistic about Africa's economic future in a pair of articles published last week. Here's what's happening on the ground: • In 2024, Africa's 500 largest firms recorded their highest-ever revenues in dollar terms. As these firms grow, they're reinvesting. • Nearly 50% of venture capital raised in Africa last year came from African investors — the highest share ever recorded. • The $1 trillion-plus sitting on the balance-sheets of African pension funds, insurance funds, and sovereign wealth funds is increasingly being redirected from government bills and bonds toward private equity and infrastructure. Just last year, for example, Ghana mandated 5% of its state pension fund go to private equity and venture capital. • The @Africa_Finance Corporation, the multilateral DFI built to bridge Africa’s infrastructure gap, increased its investments to $4.5B last year — roughly $2B more than its total in the previous two years. • And Africa's industrialist-in-chief @AlikoDangote — having reversed a decade of decline in the continent's oil refining capacity with a single Nigerian refinery — is now eyeing a $2.5B fertilizer project in Ethiopia, $1B in cement, power generation, and infrastructure deals in Zimbabwe, mining projects across Central Africa, and more. And when African capital leads, foreign capital follows. As Dangote said at an economic summit in Imo State, Nigeria, last year: “If we don’t invest at home, there is nobody on Earth who will come and invest here. What attracts foreign investors is the domestic investments, and that’s what we are doing." It reminds me of what Celtel founder & Sudan-born billionaire Mo Ibrahim said in a Bloomberg interview last year: "Africans must not fear Africa. We need to start investing in ourselves... African investors must invest more in our own continent." (linkedin.com/posts/afridige…) Slowly but surely, that's happening: Africans — across the continent and the diaspora — are beginning to bet on Africa at scale. -- Afridigest Intelligence — real intelligence to win in Africa's growth markets: afridigest.com/intelligence