August 2026
28Aug

African Pension Funds shift more capital into private equity

Ghana is increasingly being recognised as one of Africa’s most credible examples of how domestic pension savings can be invested in more diverse alternatives and channelled into assets such as private equity, venture capital and SME growth financing. Ghana has spearheaded notable pension industry initiatives focused on shifting domestic capital pools towards the real economy, including GVCA’s 5% Pension and Insurance Industry Compact, launched in April 2025, Impact Investing Ghana’s Pension Industry Collaborative, and the $70m SME Fund of Funds...

August 28, 2026
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04Aug

Evidence reveals how African pension and sovereign wealth funds are increasingly allocating to alternative assets like private equity

Ghana is increasingly positioning itself as one of Africa’s most credible examples of how domestic pension savings can be channeled into private equity, venture capital and SME growth financing with industry initiatives focused on shifting domestic African capital pools towards local real economy investments, including the Ghana Venture Capital and Private Equity Association GVCA 5% Pension and Insurance Industry Compact launched in April 2025 and the $70m Fund of Funds Ci Gaba managed by Savannah Impact Advisory. At a recent...

August 4, 2026
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July 2026
17Jul

Extending Pension Coverage to the Informal Sector in Africa

By Melis Guven  The coverage of pension systems in the Africa region is limited to the small segment of the population in the formal sector. Coverage is thin partly because traditional contributory pension schemes are not responding to the needs of the informal sector. As a result, a large share of the region’s adult population has no access to contributory pension schemes during their working lives. This means they will not be eligible for a pension. It also means the...

July 17, 2026
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October 2025
08Oct

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...

October 8, 2025
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September 2025
02Sep

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...

September 2, 2025
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August 2025
20Aug

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...

August 20, 2025
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June 2025
23Jun

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...

June 23, 2025
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10Jun

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...

June 10, 2025
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06Jun

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...

June 6, 2025
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May 2025
23May

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...

May 23, 2025
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