Capital Systems

Access to a range of financing instruments is critical for scale. African-specific evidence confirms that ventures not facing credit constraints grow faster than those that do - which justifies the sustained effort to increase capital availability. That justification is necessary but not sufficient. The structure of African capital - who holds it, who deploys it, on what terms, to whom, and through what institutional architecture - matters as much as the volume.

The graphic below sets out the mismatch: what African scaling ventures actually need against what the dominant capital architecture supplies. The correction period has provided something more useful than theory: empirical evidence about which parts of the capital architecture failed, which held, and why.