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Africa’s Trillion-Dollar Shift: When the State Becomes the Biggest Investor

  • Writer: Derry Thornalley
    Derry Thornalley
  • 1 day ago
  • 5 min read

For decades, African finance ministers flew to Washington, London or Beijing when they needed capital. Today, a quiet reversal is underway.


According to new data from state-owned investor tracker GlobalSWF, African public institutions now manage close to $1 trillion in assets – a historic high.


That pool sits not in foreign aid budgets, but in:

  • Public pension funds

  • Central bank reserve portfolios

  • Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs)

  • Public development banks and social security institutions


In 2025 alone, five new sovereign wealth funds were launched in Botswana, the DR Congo, Eswatini, Kenya and Nigeria’s Oyo State, bringing Africa’s SWF count to roughly 33 funds.


It is a structural shift: from relying on external capital to mobilising Africa’s own balance sheet.


Who are Africa’s new power brokers?

A handful of institutions now sit at the centre of this story.

  • In South Africa, the Public Investment Corporation (PIC) manages about R2.7 trillion (roughly $140 billion) on behalf of the Government Employees Pension Fund, making it Africa’s largest single asset manager.

  • In Libya, the Libyan Investment Authority remains the continent’s largest SWF, with around $68 billion in assets.

  • Across the continent, public pension funds, central banks and SWFs together now control around $1 trillion, while broader estimates from the Africa Finance Corporation and AfDB suggest $1.1–2.1 trillion in domestic institutional capital when insurance, development banks and social security institutions are included.


Crucially, many of these entities are long-term investors by design. They hold patient capital that, in theory, can sit across infrastructure, climate projects and productive businesses for decades.


The question is no longer whether the money exists. It’s what Africa does with it.


Why the surge – and why now?

Several trends are converging:

  1. Shrinking concessional finance and foreign aid Donor budgets are under pressure and global concessional lending has become more selective. African governments have been forced to look inward. GlobalSWF notes that many African state investors were created or expanded precisely as a response to falling aid and more volatile external funding.

  2. Growing pension and insurance reserves Formal employment may still be a minority experience on the continent, but where pension and social security schemes exist, assets have compounded over time. The OECD and AfDB both highlight African pension and insurance funds as potentially powerful drivers of capital-market development – if properly mobilised.

  3. The rise of African SWFs In 2025, new funds in Botswana, DRC, Eswatini, Kenya and Oyo joined existing vehicles in countries like Nigeria, Angola and Morocco. Together, African SWFs still represent only about 1% of global SWF assets (roughly $14.3 trillion worldwide), but their number and ambition are growing fast.

  4. A pivot toward climate and infrastructure Recent updates from the Africa Sovereign Wealth Funds Association show several funds increasing allocations to climate resilience, renewable energy and strategic infrastructure – from Nigeria’s NSIA to Angola’s FSDEA and Botswana’s Pula-related vehicles.


Taken together, these trends are turning public investors into “fortresses of sovereignty”: institutions that can both stabilise national finances and co-invest alongside global capital.


Power… and responsibility

With great balance sheets comes great responsibility.


At their best, Africa’s state investors can:

  • Anchor long-term infrastructure – roads, grids, ports, digital backbones.

  • Crowd in foreign direct investment by taking first-loss or cornerstone positions.

  • Support domestic capital markets through predictable, rules-based participation.


In fact, many African SWFs explicitly describe their mission as catalysing FDI into Africa, not just parking surplus reserves offshore.


At their worst, however, they can become:

  • Vehicles for politicised lending to state-owned enterprises.

  • Quiet sources of fiscal backstopping that delay necessary reforms.

  • Large, opaque pools of capital that make it harder, not easier, for citizens and markets to understand a country’s real risk position – as recent “hidden debt” episodes across the continent have shown.


The difference between those two paths is not only governance. It is also plumbing: the systems, data and reporting that let boards, regulators and co-investors see clearly where the money actually is and what it is doing.


The mobilisation gap: from balance sheet to real economy


Several studies now make the same point: Africa is not capital-poor. It is often intermediation-poor.


The Africa Finance Corporation estimates that over $1.1 trillion in domestic institutional capital could, in principle, be deployed toward long-term growth – if the right structures, risk-sharing mechanisms and prudential guidance are in place.


The AfDB echoes this, noting that pension and insurance funds could be powerful drivers of market liquidity, trading volumes and price discovery, but are frequently constrained by regulation, capacity and a lack of investable pipelines.


In other words:

  • The assets exist.

  • The need exists – in infrastructure, energy transition, healthcare, housing, digital and more.

  • What is missing is the connective tissue that makes it safe and practical for African state investors to deploy capital across local, regional and global opportunities in a disciplined way.


Where Verī Platform fits: quiet plumbing for public capital

This is precisely where Verī Platform is designed to operate: not as a fund or a product promoter, but as infrastructurebehind regulated institutions.


For public pension funds, sovereign funds, public development banks and large asset managers, Verī can:

  • Combine local holdings – government bonds, local corporates, domestic equities – with pan-African and global assets in a single, regulated architecture.

  • Connect to multiple custodians and trading venues (local and offshore), while maintaining a single, look-through ledger of every mandate, portfolio and underlying account.

  • Produce supervisor-ready reporting that gives central banks, regulators and auditors clear visibility of currency, duration, issuer and sector risks – across all portfolios, not just a subset.


In practice, that might mean:

  • A national pension fund committing to an infrastructure platform at home,

  • Co-investing with regional and global partners in climate or logistics projects,

  • Maintaining a stabilising allocation to liquid global markets –

all orchestrated and reconciled through one platform, instead of dozens of fragmented systems and spreadsheets.


Verī does not decide what Africa’s state investors should own. It helps ensure that whatever they do own is visible, trackable and manageable – for boards, for regulators and, ultimately, for citizens.


From “aid dependence” to balance-sheet sovereignty

Africa’s near-trillion-dollar public wealth milestone is not the end of the story. It is the starting point for a new question:

Can the continent turn state balance sheets into engines of real, broad-based growth – or will this capital remain trapped in low-yield reserves, politicised projects and opaque vehicles?

The answer will depend on governance, policy – and on whether the right tools and platforms are in place to mobilise this capital safely.


What is clear is that the narrative has changed. Africa is no longer only asking how much capital it can attract from abroad. It is asking how effectively it can deploy the capital it already controls.


In that shift, the quiet architects – the boards, CIOs and platforms behind Africa’s state investors – may prove just as important as any headline-grabbing deal.

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