$140 Trillion: A Call to Action for Africa’s Financial Future

By Kelly Mua Kingsly

The world’s leading asset managers now oversee about US$140 trillion, according to WTW’s 2025 research. That is more than the combined annual output of every economy on earth. Against that, the roughly US$1.1 trillion held by African institutional investors, per the OECD, looks like a rounding error: under 1 percent of the global total.

The comparison is uncomfortable, and it should be. It points to a question Africa can no longer avoid: when will the continent build financial institutions able to compete at scale?

The Gap Is Not Only About Capital

Africa’s development needs are enormous. The African Development Bank puts the annual financing gap at more than US$400 billion, equal to over a third of the continent’s entire institutional asset base, every year. Between 2013 and 2022, Africa drew only 6 percent to 8 percent of global private infrastructure investment. Less than 3 percent of institutional assets worldwide were allocated to it.

The usual diagnosis is a shortage of capital. That is only half right. Africa has savings, in pension funds, insurers, and sovereign vehicles, and those savings are growing. What it lacks is the plumbing that turns them into productive assets: bankable projects, deep local-currency markets, credible guarantees, and managers with the skill to price risk and the independence to be trusted with other people’s money.

In short, Africa needs more than capital. It needs a financial architecture that can harness, manage, and multiply what it already has.

Five Reforms That Would Change the Picture

1. Mobilize domestic savings. Strong pension, insurance, and investment funds are the foundation of any serious capital market. Long-term domestic money is patient money. It does not flee at the first sign of currency stress, and it keeps returns, and decisions, on the continent.
2. Integrate capital markets. Fragmentation is expensive. Few African markets are deep enough on their own to support large issuances or specialized asset managers. The African Continental Free Trade Area offers a framework for cross-border investment and regulatory interoperability. Trade in goods was the first step. Trade in capital should follow.
3. Build bankable assets. Investors cannot buy what does not exist. Infrastructure, renewable energy, and agriculture all offer attractive long-term returns, but only when projects arrive with sound structures, transparent cash flows, and enforceable contracts. A better pipeline would do more than any investment conference.
4. De-risk investment. Currency mismatch is among the most stubborn obstacles to funding African infrastructure, because projects earn local currency while much capital is raised in dollars. Local-currency guarantees and blended finance can shift risk to those best equipped to bear it, and they can draw institutional money that would otherwise stay on the sidelines.
5. Cultivate world-class institutions. Governance, investor protection, and asset management expertise are not afterthoughts. Capital flows to institutions it trusts. Building that trust takes strong regulation, independent boards, and a deep bench of professionals who can compete with their global peers.

Proof That the Model Works

The case for optimism is not theoretical. Consider Nigeria’s InfraCredit, which shows what targeted credit enhancement can do. Its guarantee-backed model helped lift pension fund investment in infrastructure from ₦1.2 billion (US$891,000) to more than ₦242 billion (US$180 million). That is roughly a 200-fold increase.

The lesson is not that pension funds were unwilling to invest in infrastructure. They were unwilling to bear risks they could not price or manage. Once a credible guarantee removed that obstacle, the money moved. If one well-designed instrument can unlock that much domestic capital in one market, the opportunity across a continent of 54 countries is hard to overstate.

The 2035 Ambition

A decade is long enough to change an industry if the work starts now. By 2035, Africa should aim for:

• Globally competitive African asset managers
• Deeper local-currency markets
• Greater institutional investment in productive assets
• African capital driving African development

This is not a call for financial nationalism. Global investors are welcome and necessary partners. But a continent that depends mainly on outside capital, and outside institutions to steward it, will always be negotiating on someone else’s terms. A continent whose own savings finance its own growth sets the terms itself.

Where to Begin

Reforms of this kind rarely fail for lack of ideas. They fail for lack of sequencing, and because everyone waits for someone else to move first. Pension regulators, finance ministries, development banks, and private managers each hold part of the solution, and none can succeed alone.

My own view, as a finance engineer, is that the sequence should start with de-risking. Guarantees and blended finance can show quickly what is possible, as InfraCredit did, and they build the track record that deeper markets and stronger institutions later depend on. Others will argue for starting with regulatory integration or domestic savings. That debate is worth having, and soon.

Africa’s next generation of financial champions will not appear by accident. They will emerge from deliberate choices about which reforms to prioritize and which institutions to build. The capital is there. The task is to build the architecture around it.

Kelly Mua Kingsly brings extensive expertise in public finance and strategic leadership. He currently serves as the Head of Finance Operations at the Ministry of Finance of Cameroon, while also holding a dual role as Project Finance Manager at the Ministry of Economy, Planning, and Regional Development, and Censor at the Central Bank of Central African States (BEAC). He has previously served as Chairperson of the Board of the African Trade & Investment Development Insurance (ATIDI) and as a Director on the Board of Quantum Blockchain Capital. Driven by a strong passion for Africa’s economic transformation, he is deeply committed to advancing the continent’s path toward industrialization.