Infrastructure tasks in Africa, significantly in sectors reminiscent of renewable vitality, have lengthy relied on financing from outdoors the continent. Growth finance establishments, largely from European international locations, stay key gamers in offering the capital for Africa’s wind farms and photo voltaic parks.
Nonetheless, Anas Charafi, a senior funding director at infrastructure funding platform Africa50, says that the continent can speed up the rollout of renewables by harnessing its personal monetary sources.
“We positively want to herald new sources of capital,” he says. “One space that is essential is mobilising native funding, significantly from institutional traders. There’s a fairly a big pool of capital inside Africa that would go to funding infrastructure tasks.”
Africa50 is owned by 31 African international locations together with the African Growth Financial institution, the Central Financial institution of West African States and Morocco’s Financial institution Al-Maghrib. The platform reached a key milestone in its efforts to mobilise African capital on the finish of final 12 months, when it introduced that its Infrastructure Acceleration Fund has secured commitments from 16 African institutional traders. These embrace a few of the continent’s main pension funds and insurance coverage firms.
“We’re fairly proud to have achieved the launch of this fund that’s devoted to infrastructure in Africa, which for the primary time ever has mobilised capital basically from native institutional traders,” says Chafari. The fund has to this point secured $225.5m from its 16 African traders, plus the Worldwide Finance Company.
Many African international locations have seen the belongings managed by institutional traders develop significantly in recent times. An IFC examine of seven African international locations printed in 2022 discovered that pension funds’ belongings beneath administration grew by a median of 65% between 2016 and 2020 alone.
Nonetheless, pension fund managers usually desire to spend money on authorities bonds or the native inventory market. Infrastructure belongings have historically been perceived as riskier bets.
Charafi acknowledges that African institutional traders “want a little bit of help to get acquainted with the asset class”. However he provides that it “would make a number of sense” for them to spend money on infrastructure, on condition that the asset class delivers returns over a very long time interval and may in concept be ideally fitted to funds with a mandate to make long-term investments.
Enhancing macro outlook
One other optimistic issue, Charafi says, is that African builders are more and more well-placed to ship tasks. “Now we see a couple of actually credible builders and traders constructing capability of their dwelling market and beginning to broaden.”
He highlights Madagascar’s Axian Group, Egypt’s Taqa Arabia and Morocco’s Nareva as examples of African gamers which might be “on a par with worldwide builders”.
“That’s one other development that I feel we’ll see persevering with as a result of on the finish of the day, who’s higher positioned to spend money on Africa than Africans?” he asks.
Total, Charafi is “moderately optimistic” that 2024 might be 12 months for renewable vitality tasks on the continent. The sector is benefitting from “post-COP momentum”, he says, with tasks pledged eventually 12 months’s local weather summit in Dubai now coming to fruition. Africa50 signed offers at COP28 to fund a significant photo voltaic and battery undertaking storage undertaking in Mozambique that may embrace the continent’s first large-scale floating photo voltaic infrastructure, together with an electrical energy transmission undertaking in the identical nation.
A modest enchancment within the macroeconomic state of affairs in most African international locations also needs to produce positive aspects for infrastructure funding, Charafi says.
“We expect that the financial and monetary surroundings is stabilising,” he says. “Most likely the worst is behind us and we must always see an enchancment.”
“We see fairly a little bit of momentum from early-stage tasks that had been initiated in 2023, which ought to bear fruit in 2024.”
In the end, Africa must be able to compete for funding with a purpose to drive enhancements to its renewable vitality infrastructure, Charafi says. “There may be fairly a bit of cash that’s obtainable globally for inexperienced tasks. It’s only a matter for Africa to seize it.”
