veri blog

South Africa’s formal Afreximbank membership closes the continent’s most significant multilateral finance gap and commits $8 billion to industrial, trade, and transformation priorities. On 4 February 2026, at a formal ceremony attended by President Cyril Ramaphosa and Afreximbank President Dr George Elombi, the Republic of South Africa officially acceded to the Establishment Agreement of the African Export-Import Bank, becoming the 54th state to join Africa’s leading multilat

Canal+’s historic JSE listing is the clearest statement yet that Africa’s largest exchange has reached the international standing that demands institutional-grade indexation to match. On 3 June 2026, Canal+, the global media and entertainment company that completed its acquisition of MultiChoice in 2024, will conduct a secondary inward listing on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. The listing — which awaits final JSE approval confirmed as imminent at the time of writing — will

Africa’s $2 trillion in pension and sovereign wealth assets has crossed from mobilisation into execution — and the infrastructure to deploy it rigorously is the defining requirement of this moment. In February 2026, more than 200 institutional investors gathered in Mauritius for the ninth edition of the Pension Funds and Alternative Investments Africa summit — PI Africa 2026. The theme was ‘Empowering Africa’s Institutional Capital for Growth and Development’, and the backdro

Nigeria’s $5 billion total return swap is the continent’s clearest signal yet that African sovereign financing is evolving faster than the infrastructure designed to track it. On 24 March 2026, President Bola Tinubu submitted a request to Nigeria’s National Assembly for approval of a $5 billion external borrowing programme structured as a total return swap with First Abu Dhabi Bank, the largest lender in the United Arab Emirates. By 31 March — seven days later — both chambers

AfCRA is not about giving Africa better ratings — it is about giving Africa accurate ones, built from data that reflects the continent’s real economic structure. In February 2025, at the 37th Ordinary Summit of the African Union in Addis Ababa, African heads of state gave formal political endorsement to an idea that had been building for years: a continental credit rating agency, owned and operated by Africa, headquartered in Mauritius, and designed to assess African sovereig

Kenya’s Ziidi Trader proves that Africa’s retail investor base is not a future ambition but a present reality — and that the infrastructure to serve it must be built to match. On 10 February 2026, Safaricom and the Nairobi Securities Exchange launched Ziidi Trader, embedding direct share trading into the M-PESA Super App. The platform went live to a market of roughly 35 million M-PESA users in Kenya, removing the requirement for a separate CDS account, a licensed broker relat

A credible hard-currency venue in an unlikely setting is exactly the kind of development a rules-based reference architecture is built to evaluate on its merits rather than dismiss on its reputation. The received wisdom about Zimbabwean capital markets, for most of the last decade, has been straightforward: interesting to watch, difficult to size, structurally complicated by a currency environment that makes institutional engagement challenging. That wisdom has been defensibl

A continental payments rail that works is upstream of every capital-markets activity that crosses a border — and the maturation of PAPSS is exactly the kind of quiet, compounding development institutional investors should be paying closer attention to. There is a rhythm to capital-markets infrastructure stories on this continent. The announcement gets covered. The first transaction gets covered. Then there is a long, unglamorous middle period in which the system either goes o

An African market moving up the index-family ladder is not a category change for one country — it is a credibility export for the continent, and the kind of event indexation discipline exists to handle cleanly. The most important thing to understand about a market reclassification event is that it is not primarily about the market being reclassified. It is about what happens to everything around it when the label changes. Egypt is now close enough to a serious upward reclassi

Rwanda is the cleanest proof on the continent that market architecture, not market size, determines relevance — and that is exactly the kind of market Veri was built to make legible. I want to make an argument this week that cuts against some instinctive allocator habits. The habit is to equate market size with market relevance. Larger market, more attention. Smaller market, less attention, or none. That habit is defensible in a world where the architecture of a market scales

Why the Ethiopia Securities Exchange is the clearest signal yet that African capital markets are running faster than the narrative around them — and why Veri was built for precisely this moment. I want to talk about Ethiopia. But to do it honestly, I have to start somewhere else. For most of my career, when I told people I spent my working life thinking about African capital markets, the response sat somewhere between polite interest and polite scepticism. The markets were sm

A USD 5 billion listing in Lagos is the first real test of whether African public markets can absorb African champions at scale — and it is exactly the kind of moment Veri was built for. A company of this scale does not list in Lagos by accident. A deal of this scale does not price in Lagos by sentiment. It prices there because the market is now credible enough, deep enough and institutionally prepared enough to carry it — and because the alternative, routing to London or New

Veri Expands into Nigeria with the Appointment of Victor Bisong as Country Partner & Director Veri is proud to announce a significant milestone in its continued growth across Africa with the appointment of Victor Bisong as Country Partner & Director for Nigeria . This strategic expansion marks an important step in Veri’s vision to build a connected, accessible, and innovative investment ecosystem across the African continent. Strengthening Our Presence in a Key Market Nigeria

Accra, January 15, 2026 – Ghana’s central bank is moving decisively to reinforce the country’s currency after an unprecedented year of gains. The Bank of Ghana (BoG) has announced plans to inject up to $1 billion into the foreign exchange market in January 2026 to stabilize the cedi following its remarkable 40.7% appreciation against the US dollar in 2025. The intervention – the largest in recent memory – aims to dampen volatility and sustain the cedi’s historic gains a

Zimbabwe has implemented a wide-ranging package of new taxes and levies effective January 1, 2026, in a bid to widen its tax base and increase government revenue. The measures, announced in the 2026 National Budget and now enforced by Finance Act No. 7 of 2025, target digital services, mining exports, gambling winnings, and property rentals, among other areas. Officials say the reforms mark a major shift in the country’s fiscal strategy, touching virtually every sector of the

Kenya’s first Treasury bond auction of 2026 saw robust uptake, with the government raising Ksh 60.6 billion against a Ksh 60 billion target. Investors placed total bids of about Ksh 71.5–73 billion , making the sale oversubscribed by roughly 20% . This strong appetite – coming amid delays in external funding tied to IMF talks – highlights investor confidence in Kenya’s credit and abundant liquidity in the domestic market. The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) accepted Ksh 60.58 bi

Uganda is on the cusp of a major economic turning point. After years of courting short-term speculative capital – the so-called “hot money” flowing into high-yield local debt – the East African nation expects to begin producing oil in 2026, unlocking long-term foreign direct investment (FDI) and export revenues. Officials and analysts say this oil boom could strengthen Uganda’s balance of payments and reduce reliance on fickle capital flows, but they caution that the transiti

As Uganda heads into a pivotal national election this week, the country’s financial industry is on high alert. Bankers, investors, and analysts are closely watching for any signals of change in economic policy, fiscal discipline, debt management, monetary continuity, and regulatory stability emerging from the vote. The presidential and parliamentary polls – slated around January 15, 2026 – pit 81-year-old incumbent President Yoweri Museveni against several challengers, inclu