Author: Chidinma Nwabueze

Africa’s entire venture capital industry — every fund manager who managed to drag a final close over the line in 2025 — raised a combined $107 million across six funds. Six funds. A whole continent’s worth of VC ambition. Meanwhile, one Lagos-based seed investor strolled in and raised $84 million on its own, in a single vehicle, oversubscribed against a $75 million target, like it was picking up milk on the way home. That’s not “doing well in a hard market.” That’s one fund nearly lapping an entire industry, then checking its watch. So yes, congratulations are absolutely in order.…

Until recently, it wasn’t a name that showed up much anywhere — a rural outpost in Eswatini’s Lowveld, in a cluster of chiefdoms that a regional development bank’s own project files once described as associated with chronic poverty. That description no longer fits, and the reason is worth tracing carefully, because it’s a genuinely clean example of what DFI capital is supposed to do and rarely gets to actually demonstrate this plainly. The Capital That Went In First The catalyst is the Lower Usuthu Smallholder Irrigation Project, Phase I — E1.2 billion, approved in December 2001 and rolled out from…

Six pieces ran on Egypt between 25 and 27 August. Read individually, they cover very different corners of the market: bank rankings, an index-classification decision, an IPO, a wave of M&A, a startup governance postmortem, a regulatory scandal. Read together, they’re the same story told six times from six different rooms — a country that’s short on capital of its own, watching every other kind of institution decide, in real time, who’s trustworthy enough to hold some. The State Sells While The Regulator Seizes Esther Memeh’s “Egypt’s Two Capital Stories, One Thesis” opens with the whiplash: in the same week,…

The Deal, As Far As It’s Confirmed Per EnterpriseAM’s reporting on 17 August, EBRD and IFC are looking to buy into Banque du Caire’s planned float, which Hashem El Sayed, CEO of Egypt’s State-Owned Companies Unit, says will complete in November, with the institutional tranche covered within a week of launch. An EBRD official — unnamed in the reporting TACR could locate, so treat the attribution as institutional rather than personal — confirmed the bank’s interest. The goal, per that official, is to “contribute to Banque du Caire’s capital” and, in doing so, draw in other investors and shore up…

The Central Bank of Egypt’s supervisory framework publishes separate balance-sheet, income-statement, and financial-soundness data for the sector as a whole, for the top ten banks, and for the top five — and its own financial-stability monitoring explicitly tracks asset concentration among those top five as an indicator of systemic health. That distinction, made by the regulator itself, is the starting point for this ranking. The real question isn’t which Egyptian banks are largest. It’s which institutions are actually useful to capital, and for what kind of capital. Scale matters. So does ownership. So does whether a bank’s public disclosure is…

One is loud: a $4.5 billion oil-backed facility with NNPC approved in August, on top of a $5 billion total return swap with First Abu Dhabi Bank drawn down in phases since June — fast, large, sovereign-guaranteed borrowing that the IMF’s own resident representative has publicly warned carries “opaque” terms typical of derivatives-based structures. That’s the kind of capital that makes headlines because the number is big and the mechanism is unusual. The other is quiet: a multi-year, still-unfinished rebuild of Nigeria’s entire domestic development finance architecture, running since January. It’s less dramatic. It’s also the one that actually determines…

The Deal On 6 July, the Emerging Africa & Asia Infrastructure Fund (EAAIF) — a blended-finance vehicle under the UK-anchored Private Infrastructure Development Group, managed by Ninety One — committed a $30 million senior secured corporate loan to Hassan Allam Utilities, the investment arm of one of Egypt’s largest construction conglomerates. The money backs the Minya project: a 1,000 MW solar plant paired with a 660 MWh battery storage system, co-developed with Infinity Power, the Masdar–Infinity joint venture. That $30 million sits on top of a $40 million facility EAAIF extended to the same developer in November 2024. Total EAAIF…

The Lagos Venture Finance Summit, organised by Vencapital, returns for its second edition on September 3–4, 2026, in Lagos. Following a successful inaugural gathering, this year’s summit sharpens its focus on a critical bottleneck in Africa’s startup ecosystem: the mobilisation of domestic institutional capital and family office investment into venture funds. While international development finance institutions (DFIs) have long been active in Africa, the next frontier of sustainable ecosystem growth lies in unlocking local wealth — specifically from high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs), family offices, and Nigerian institutional investors. Why This Summit Matters Africa’s venture capital ecosystem has historically relied heavily on…

AFSIC – Investing in Africa 2026 is set to convene at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge, London, on 13–14 October 2026. Now in its 13th edition, AFSIC has established itself as Africa’s largest annual investor event held outside the continent, serving as the critical bridge between African deal flow and global institutional capital. For African founders, fund managers, and policymakers, AFSIC is the premier gateway to international investors, development finance institutions, and family offices actively deploying capital into African markets. Why AFSIC Matters Despite record venture capital and private equity flows into Africa in recent years, a significant funding gap…

FSD Africa has opened registration for the Third Sustainable Capital Markets Conference, scheduled for 15–16 September 2026 at the Trademark Hotel, Nairobi. Building on the momentum of two prior editions, this year’s conference convenes regulators, institutional investors, asset managers, and development finance institutions to accelerate the integration of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) principles into Africa’s capital markets. Why This Conference Matters Africa faces a dual challenge: financing rapid economic development while navigating the global transition to a low-carbon economy. Sustainable capital markets — including green bonds, social bonds, sustainability-linked loans, and ESG-integrated investment strategies — offer a pathway to…