October 2025

African pension funds unify to mobilize $700b for continent’s development

African pension providers are for the first time unifying their efforts to create a domestic financing pool, aiming to mobilize their collective $700 billion in assets to establish a “Development Fund for Africa.” The unprecedented move is driven by an imperative to fund the continent’s development needs locally and reduce reliance on traditional foreign funding, according to leaders in the industry. The African Development Bank estimates the continent needs more than $1.3 trillion annually to meet its development goals. The plan...

September 2025

How Africa is grappling with an impending aging crisis

Across Africa, a stunning success story has quietly taken hold: Decades of progress have begun delivering a wave of longevity that promises to reshape the demographics of the continent. But as lifespans lengthen and villages begin to fill with the old, pensions and social safety nets are minimal, medical care is lacking and routine problems of age are so commonly unaddressed that cataracts turn to blindness and minor infections end in death. Longer lives, time and again, come with more...

August 2025

Financial inclusion, mobile money and the rural, informal economy

FINTECH has revolutionalised banking activities globally over the past one decade so tremendously in both scale and scope. In developing countries, it has brought banking within the reach of many hitherto disadvantaged cohorts of the populace, thus drawing them into the ever-widening circle of those having access to banking operations. It has also contributed significantly to wealth creation within the underprivileged populace, providing regular incomes and access to credit in many instances. Africa has opened up and started to...

June 2025

African Development Bank’s Commitment to Paris Alignment

The African Development Bank is fully committed to aligning its operations and investments with the goals of the Paris Agreement. This alignment supports Africa’s sustainable development, helps address climate challenges, and promotes climate resilience and low-carbon growth, in line with the Bank’s Ten-Year Strategy and the African Union’s Agenda 2063 “The Africa We Want”. PARIS AGREEMENT The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change, adopted by 196 parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris...

Africa can fund infrastructure with $4 trillion of own assets: AFC

Africa must shift away from a dependency on foreign infrastructure financing and begin to unlock the potential of its own substantial financial resources, according to the Africa Finance Corporation. The organisation’s State of Africa’s Infrastructure Report 2025 argues that Africa is not lacking in capital – it points to over $4 trillion in domestic resources, including commercial bank assets, pension funds, remittances, and sovereign wealth –  but is failing to fully leverage what it already possesses. “Financing this infrastructure transformation must...

Africa can tap $1.1trn from investors for growth, AFC says

African institutional investors are sitting on $1.1 trillion in capital that could finance the region’s long-term infrastructure needs and power industrial growth, the Africa Finance Corporation said Thursday. Pensions and insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds and public development banks are still channeling funds into “low-risk and short-term instruments instead of being channelled into the real economy,” according to the multilateral lender’s 2025 State of Africa’s Infrastructure Report. The AFC estimates that $455 billion of the capital sits in pension funds, while...

May 2025

Reforming pensions in Africa: Addressing coverage, payoutdisparities, and dementia outcomes for sustainable aging

By yprian M. Mostert, Catherine Ajalo & David Andai We appreciate the thoughtful feedback from scholars who suggest thatwe should have used life expectancy at age 45 or 25 to support ourargument for pension reforms in Africa. While life expectancy at thesespecific ages provides an average estimate of the remaining lifespan, itdoes not capture the nuances of individual survival probabilities, mak-ing it less reliable for certain analyses. This remains a debated topic inthe literature.1,2 Life expectancy at birth, on the...

March 2025

AFC chief pushes to unlock billions from African pension funds

The African Finance Corporation said it is accelerating efforts to mobilise the continent’s own money for investments, and tapping investors in the Middle East and Asia, as developing nations grapple with seismic shifts in geopolitics and funding flows. Samaila Zubairu, chief executive of the AFC – a development finance institution owned by Nigeria’s central bank and other African financial institutions – said in an interview the lender is ready to weather a world in which the United States and Europe...

February 2025

How to unlock the potential of micro pension schemes

The informal economy plays a critical role in Kenya, contributing significantly to economic growth and vitality. Comprising diverse workers, from market traders and artisans to small-scale entrepreneurs and gig workers, this sector represents the backbone of the country's workforce. Yet, despite its significance, individuals in the economy often find themselves excluded from traditional pension arrangements. The absence of employer-provided benefits and access to formal pension schemes leaves millions vulnerable, with little to no safety net to secure their futures when they are...

July 2024

Unemployment in Informal Labor Markets in Developing Countries

By Emily Breza & Supreet Kaur Developing countries typically exhibit low rates of rural wage employment. For example, in India, male workers whose primary source of earnings is wage labor report working on only 46 percent of days per year.1 Bangladesh has a similarly low 55 percent rate of employment among landless males, and the rates are even lower in sub-Saharan Africa. What do these low employment rates mean? One possibility is that they reflect extremely high involuntary unemployment. Alternatively, the rates...