Business & Economy

$4trn unlocked capital shows Africa, Caribbean ‘capital-rich, delivery-poor’, experts say


Top financiers and policymakers from Africa and the Caribbean on Thursday, issued a call for the continent and its island neighbors to unlock and deploy over $4 trillion in domestic capital to accelerate infrastructure development and economic transformation.

Panelists who spoke Thursday at a high-level panel titled “Powering Development with Own Capital: A Call to Action to African/Caribbean Multilateral Financial Institutions” during the ongoing 32nd Annual General Meeting of the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) in Abuja, commonly agreed that both regions possess significant capital resources, but lack the frameworks and political will to deploy them efficiently.

They called for homegrown institutions to step up execution and mobilise domestic capital to bridge the continent’s gaping infrastructure and development financing gap—estimated at over $160 billion annually.

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The capital, they said is parked in local pensions, reserves, and sovereign wealth funds, and agreed that Africa and the Caribbean remain capital-rich but delivery-poor.

“The challenge is ultimately the process. It’s getting things done,” Arnold Ekpe, Chairman of BCA and Former Group Chief Executive Officer, Ecobank, who featured as a panelist said.

Beyond capital availability, Ekpe argued that there is also a bigger challenge of enabling capital to move.

According to him, “It is easier to travel within Africa on a European passport than an African one. If people can’t move, capital won’t either.”

Part of the answer, the panelists agreed, lies in creating structures and regulatory environments that allow private sector actors to take calculated risks, innovate, and scale.

“Let’s just gather 20–30 entrepreneurs, empower them, and get things done,” Ekpe insisted. That’s the future.”

Drawing on decades of experience in African banking, Ekpe also argued that while blueprints and feasibility studies abound, implementation lags due to excessive dependence on multilateral institutions and donor cycles.

He said the private sector needs to “step up.” Citing the $20 billion Dangote Refinery in Nigeria, Ekpe added, “If he was waiting for this process, we wouldn’t have a refinery today.”

That view was echoed by Samaila Zubairu, President and CEO, Africa Finance Corporation (AFC), who emphasised the scale of the capital already available within Africa. “Africa holds over $4 trillion in domestic capital,” he noted, breaking that down to $1 trillion in pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth funds, and $400 billion in forex reserves.

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“The challenge is channeling it,” Zubairu said, pointing to to AFC’s model of taking early-stage risk to develop projects until they are bankable, after which institutions like insurers, DFIs, and local banks are brought in. “We always include local banks. They must step in.”

According to Zubairu, local banks in Africa are significantly under-leveraged compared to their Asian counterparts.

He said while the median African bank holds $450 million in assets, in Asia the figure exceeds $1.2 billion. Private sector credit in Africa hovers around $200 million versus $2 billion in Asia.

He explained the Corporation’s role is to credit-enhance and use its balance sheet to get capital to banks faster and cheaper.

He also underscored the importance of empowering the private sector to create the needed jobs.

The Caribbean’s challenges are, however different, but complementary.

With capital costs rising globally and multilateral processes often lagging behind emergencies, Daniel Best, President, Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) called for urgency.


He stressed that between 1951 and 2016, the Caribbean suffered over 330 natural disasters, and pointed to a $19.6 billion infrastructure financing gap identified in six Caribbean countries alone.

“ Speed is paramount. “People want to know who delivers first,” Best stressed.

He criticised the slow disbursement models of traditional multilateral institutions and called for a streamlined approach to crowd in private capital, adding: “We must remove value-depleting layers in the global finance architecture.

On her part, Marlene Attzs, a professor and advisor to the University of the West Indies, warned of many external financing models, structurally misaligned with national priorities.

She stressed that finance must be locally designed to be effective, and that “loans must be constitutionally and institutionally aligned with national priorities.”

“Too often, external funders frame vehicles in misaligned ways,” she said. “When finance isn’t aligned with local priorities, we get implementation deficits.”

She emphasised “homegrown solutions and institutions,” noting that Caribbean states are often capital-deficient despite being resource-rich.

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Simon Tiemtoré, Chairman of Vista Group and Lilium Capital, took a direct line on the region’s capital-raising conundrum.

He noted that “Western institutions often attach strings aligned to their values, observing that when African leaders define local priorities, funding needs to match them.

He detailed how Vista Bank has structured multi-million-euro road and airport projects in West Africa using a blended approach anchored on national development plans. “We empower African champions who can implement infrastructure around the continent,” he said.

Tiemtoré also advocated for bold regulatory reforms that could unlock billions in African institutional capital.

He explained that South African pension and sovereign wealth funds are currently limited to investing just 5% outside their domestic markets—but if institutions like the Africa Finance Corporation were recognised as “local,” they could channel more capital into them.

He championed instruments like “future flow fund financing”—revenue-backed models with no sovereign debt implications.

During the session, discussion returned frequently to the issue of ratings and risk. “Africa doesn’t default like Greece or Argentina—we pay our debts,” Tiemtoré, stated.

The panel agreed that ratings agencies often penalise multilateral development banks for doing exactly what they were created to do: support vulnerable economies.

“After a hurricane hits Grenada or the Bahamas and we step in, the rating agencies say, ‘slow down, your exposure is too high,” Best stressed.

“But if we are not unlocking resources when people need it, what good is that rating?”

On his part, Ekpe cautioned against over-reliance on credit ratings in intra-African or Caribbean investment decisions.

According to him, “A Ghanaian investing in Côte d’Ivoire looks at the opportunity, not the Moody’s rating,” he said. “Africa is not entirely capital-deficient. South Africa, Nigeria, Morocco, Egypt have capital. But it doesn’t move easily.”



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