There are between 8,000 and 10,000 family offices worldwide today. Africa’s share of that number, according to Deloitte Private’s 2024 Family Office Insights Series, is 60 — a figure the report itself states plainly on page three of its executive summary, sourced to data compiled by Wealth-X, an Altrata company. North America alone has 3,180. Asia Pacific has 2,290.
Sixty offices on a continent this size isn’t a rounding error. It’s close to a null result. And the strange part is that it doesn’t look like a wealth problem. The Africa Wealth Report 2025, published by Henley & Partners, estimates 122,500 millionaires on the continent, 348 centi-millionaires worth more than $100 million, and 25 billionaires. Whatever threshold you use for “family office territory,” there is no shortage of candidates. Sixty offices for a population of wealth holders in the hundreds of thousands is not a supply-matches-demand outcome by any reading of those numbers.
Two Different Diagnoses
The easy explanation is a liquidity story. African wealth is young. It’s still first-generation, still tangled up inside the businesses that created it — the cement plant, the bank, the manufacturing line — and hasn’t yet gone through the kind of exit that turns a founder’s stake into a diversified, liquid portfolio a family office would know what to do with. Give it time, the story goes, and as more founders sell down, list, or bring in institutional capital, the wealth will loosen up and the offices will follow.
It’s a reasonable story. It just isn’t the whole one. Talk to the people actually building this infrastructure on the ground, and a different, more specific — and honestly more fixable — problem comes into view.
What The Practitioners Actually See
Olufunke Olumide, a partner at The Legacy Haus, the multifamily office arm of Nigeria’s Acuity Partners, doesn’t hedge on this. “The African model starts with structure, and then they build investments around it,” she says. “In many developed markets, family offices are built around investment management and portfolio optimization. In the African context, we have found that families are first focused on ownership, establishing governance, and continuity.” That’s not a description of illiquid wealth waiting for an exit.
It’s a description of wealth that’s already sizeable and often already spread across operating businesses, real estate, and global holdings — but sitting there “without coordinated ownership frameworks, formal governance systems, or clear intergenerational decision-making structures,” in her words. The money, in other words, is frequently already in a form somebody could manage. What’s missing is the layer that decides who owns what, who gets to decide, and what happens the day the founder no longer can.
Even the families who’ve taken a first step haven’t necessarily closed the gap. Olumide points out that trusts with corporate trustees usually get set up to dodge probate, not to solve governance — they’re built narrowly around capital preservation, “without fully addressing broader questions of governance, continuity and family coordination.” There’s a protective wrapper. There’s rarely an actual coordinating institution underneath it.
The South African Counterexample — And Its Limits
If this is right, South Africa is the place that should prove it, because South Africa has the oldest fiduciary infrastructure anywhere on the continent. Private Client Holdings has been building trust, tax, and estate-planning structures for South African families since 1990 — co-founded by Grant Alexander and Andrew Ratcliffe — with dedicated fiduciary, wealth management, and cash management divisions. Its standing isn’t just self-described: in the 2024 Krutham (formerly Intellidex) Top Private Banks & Wealth Managers survey — based on responses from 12,317 clients across 170 firms — PCH was named Top Wealth Manager: Boutiques, an independently reported result, not a company press release. It’s the closest thing the continent has to a mature multi-family-office model.
One caveat worth stating plainly: PCH co-founder Alexander’s clearest public statement of the firm’s coordination pitch comes from a piece published under his own byline on Blue Chip Digital, which is tagged at the foot of the article as sourced from Private Client Holdings itself. That makes it company-authored copy, not an independent interview — his words, but not tested by a reporter’s questions. With that caveat attached: “Should a wealth creator die, our team is able to provide support and guidance to ensure the family’s wealth grows and is seamlessly transferred to the next generation.”
The Legacy Haus, by comparison, is a much younger animal. It grew out of a law practice founded around 2018, with the multifamily-office side spinning up roughly four years later, according to Olumide’s own account to Family Business Magazine — and it already serves clients across Africa, North America, and the UK. PCH has something like a three-decade head start on it.
And yet South Africa, with all that head start, still only accounts for a slice of Africa’s total. AllFamilyOffices.com’s directory of South African family offices, last updated 15 May 2026, counts a little over 20 identified firms — the largest cluster on the continent, mostly bunched around Johannesburg’s Sandton district. That’s a commercial industry directory rather than a peer-reviewed census, so treat the exact count as approximate, but the order of magnitude is the point: barely a fifth of Africa’s total family-office count, in the country with the longest fiduciary track record.
Ninety One, one of South Africa’s biggest asset managers, built a digital family-office platform for exactly this reason. It rolled the offering out in two stages — phase one at the end of 2021, letting advisors group clients into a “family” on its platform, and phase two in mid-March 2022, adding consolidated reporting across family members, according to Citywire’s 20 April 2022 report quoting Ninety One Africa’s head of marketing, Kotie Basson.
The rationale was spelled out in Ninety One’s own press release, “Ninety One launches Family Office to support inter-generational wealth management,” in which Daryll Welsh, Head of Product at Ninety One Investment Platform, said advisors risked losing assets at the point of inheritance because “family-run businesses and trusts often lack robust succession and governance frameworks” — forcing advisors to engage entire families rather than a single decision-maker to keep assets from scattering the moment an inheritance kicked in.
That’s the tell, really. If South Africa’s problem were mainly about illiquid, undiversified wealth, three decades of fiduciary infrastructure should have produced a much bigger, more mature family office market by now. It hasn’t. Even the continent’s most developed fiduciary ecosystem keeps running into a governance wall right at the point of generational transfer. The infrastructure exists — just in pockets, and it hasn’t scaled anywhere close to the demand sitting next to it.
The Honest Read
Some African wealth genuinely is still too raw and undiversified for any office to manage yet. But weigh the two explanations against each other, and the evidence leans toward governance, not liquidity — which means waiting for more wealth to become liquid is a bet on someone else’s exit, while building the coordination layer Olumide and Alexander both describe is a bet available today, on wealth that’s already there.
For a family principal weighing whether to formalize now or wait for a cleaner balance sheet: don’t wait. The families Olumide describes already have enough scattered across businesses, real estate, and jurisdictions to justify a governance structure — a family constitution, a coordinated trustee, one person with authority to decide when the founder can’t. The model already exists on this continent: South Africa’s Oppenheimer family runs its wealth through Mary Oppenheimer Daughters, a holding structure with coordinated entities in Johannesburg, London, and the Isle of Man, precisely so ownership and decision-making don’t fragment as the wealth crosses generations and borders. Waiting for the exit that never quite comes is how the wealth ends up ungoverned at exactly the moment it changes hands.
For an adviser building a practice on this: the market isn’t undersupplied because the wealth is too thin to serve — it’s undersupplied because almost nobody is selling governance and coordination as the entry product. Sell that first, and the portfolio work follows.
