On 28 July 2026, One Africa Investment Fund (1AIF) opened the second subscription round for BUJA CITY PLAZA, a five-story commercial complex planned for the site of Bujumbura’s former central market. The unit price rose from BIF 103,000 (USD 103) to BIF 111,000 (USD 111), Phase 1 subscribers received an 8 percent bonus allocation on new units, and the fund set a three-month window to raise BIF 10 billion and USD 1 million. Framed as a real estate story, this is a minor transaction. Framed as a capital-markets story, it is a test of something Burundi has never had: a…
Author: Josephine King
Josephine King
Josephine is TACR’s East Africa correspondent, covering venture capital, sovereign wealth, and angel investing across the region. Her reporting examines how capital is mobilised, allocated and recycled across East African markets, with a focus on early-stage investment, institutional capital, and the structural forces shaping returns. Her work is aimed at investors, fund managers, DFIs, policymakers, and other capital-market professionals, with a focus on the mechanics behind investment decisions rather than headline announcements.
African venture capital’s most binding constraint is no longer the absence of growth capital. It is the sharp contraction in the number of first cheques being written. Company formation itself has become the scarce resource. In June 2026, Launch Africa Ventures distributed approximately $2.5 million—around 7 percent of paid-in capital—to limited partners in its 2020-vintage Seed Fund I. The figure comes directly from the firm’s own announcement of its first cash distribution, which followed eleven completed exits. That distribution made the fund DPI-positive at a moment when many peer vehicles from the same vintage have yet to return cash. The…
For more than a decade South African venture capital proved it could raise money and build companies. What it could not reliably do was return capital. The exit gap was structural, not a failure of entrepreneurship. The dominant constraints were South African Reserve Bank exchange-control rules that blocked clean cross-border IP and holding-company structures, a thin domestic corporate acquirer base, and the simple fact that most institutional funds raised between 2014 and 2018 had not yet reached harvest age. Recent data shows that these constraints are beginning to loosen. A July 2026 analysis of 226 realized exits between 2009 and…