By Olapeju Ibekwe

Africa does not suffer from a shortage of ambition. Across the continent, governments have set bold targets for industrialisation, infrastructure, education, healthcare, food security, climate resilience, digital transformation and job creation. Yet between these ambitions and their achievement sits one persistent question: how will we finance them?

The scale of the challenge is significant. Africa faces an annual Sustainable Development Goals financing gap estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The continent also requires massive investment in infrastructure, while climate adaptation alone will demand tens of billions of dollars annually in the years ahead. At the same time, millions of young Africans enter the labour market every year, requiring economies that can create jobs, enterprises and opportunities at unprecedented scale.

These figures can appear daunting. But they tell only half the story. Africa also holds enormous pools of capital, rapidly expanding markets, valuable natural resources and some of the world’s most compelling investment opportunities.

The question before us is therefore no longer simply how Africa can attract more development funding. It is how Africa can build a financing system capable of supporting transformation at scale.

That distinction matters. Funding keeps programmes running. Financing transformation builds economies, institutions and systems capable of sustaining progress long after individual programmes have ended. Africa now needs to make that transition.

The global development financing landscape is undergoing a profound shift. Official development assistance will remain essential, particularly for humanitarian response, fragile communities and interventions that cannot easily generate commercial returns. But Africa cannot build its long-term development strategy around the expectation that concessional and donor resources will continually expand to meet its needs.

Governments cannot carry the burden alone either. Many African countries are navigating difficult fiscal conditions, with rising debt obligations, currency pressures and competing public priorities. Scarce public resources must therefore be used more strategically.

This changes the fundamental question. Instead of asking, “Who will fund this?”, we should increasingly ask, “What combination of capital can finance this?”

A major infrastructure project may require public investment, development finance, guarantees and private capital. A social enterprise may need catalytic funding before it becomes commercially investable. Climate adaptation may require concessional capital to absorb risks that commercial investors cannot initially take.

Different problems require different forms of capital. Africa therefore does not simply need more money. It needs a smarter architecture for mobilising, blending and deploying capital.

That means bringing public finance, private investment, development finance, philanthropy and institutional capital together around clearly defined development outcomes.

There is significant global capital looking for credible investment opportunities. The challenge is that many African development priorities are still presented primarily as needs rather than investable propositions.

Investors need credible projects, predictable policy environments, transparent governance, reliable data, measurable returns and clear mechanisms for managing risk.

Africa must therefore improve its ability to build bankable pipelines of projects. We cannot repeatedly invite investors to Africa and then leave them to search for opportunities. Governments, development institutions and the private sector must work together to identify priority sectors, prepare projects, structure transactions and reduce perceived and actual risks.

This is particularly important in infrastructure, renewable energy, agriculture, healthcare, affordable housing and digital services, where the development need is enormous but viable commercial models can also exist. The development sector must become more fluent in the language of investment, just as investors must become more sophisticated in understanding development impact.

The opportunity lies where those two perspectives meet. But attracting capital from outside the continent cannot be the whole strategy.

African capital must become a much larger part of Africa’s development story.

Across the continent, significant resources sit within pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, commercial banks, corporations, family offices and private wealth. African businesses also control significant capital through procurement, investment, supply chains and corporate social investment.

The strategic question is how to unlock more of these resources for productive and developmental investment while maintaining appropriate risk and return expectations.

This requires financial innovation: guarantees, blended-finance vehicles, outcome-based financing, credit enhancements, pooled funds, impact investment vehicles and other mechanisms capable of making development opportunities attractive to different classes of investors.

It also requires governments to recognise that mobilising private capital is not the same as withdrawing public investment. Public finance remains critical. But increasingly, every unit of scarce public or concessional capital should be examined for its potential to mobilise additional resources.

The question should become: how much more capital can this public investment unlock? Africa must also rethink philanthropy.

The continent has a deep culture of giving, but much of that giving remains informal, fragmented or focused on immediate needs. There will always be a place for charitable giving. But the scale of Africa’s challenges requires more strategic philanthropy.

Philanthropic capital can finance experimentation, strengthen institutions, support research, provide early-stage funding and absorb first losses. When deployed strategically, relatively small amounts of philanthropic capital can unlock significantly larger pools of public and private investment. We should therefore measure philanthropy not only by how much it gives, but by how much additional capital, institutional capacity and sustainable impact it enables.

That is an important evolution from charity to catalytic capital. Africa’s financing challenge cannot be solved without its private sector.

Businesses cannot be engaged only when sponsorship or corporate social responsibility funding is required. Banks, telecommunications companies, manufacturers, energy companies, technology firms and other businesses are already financing development through investment, employment, infrastructure, taxes, innovation and supply chains.

The opportunity is to align more of this economic activity with Africa’s development priorities.

This requires a shift from seeing development as something that happens alongside business to recognising that many of Africa’s greatest development challenges are also some of its greatest market opportunities.

Providing electricity to underserved communities is a development outcome, and an investment opportunity. Financing small businesses creates livelihoods, and expands markets. Improving agricultural productivity strengthens food security, and creates value across entire supply chains. Expanding digital infrastructure improves inclusion, and unlocks new consumers and enterprises. Investing in human capital creates social value, and builds the workforce businesses will depend upon. Africa needs a private sector that increasingly sees itself not simply as a participant in the economy, but as a co-investor in the continent’s transformation.

From conversation to capital
These questions were at the heart of the 2026 Africa Social Impact Summit (ASIS) in Lagos, convened under the theme “Financing for Development: Building Resilience and Transforming Emerging Economies.”

But the relevance of ASIS goes beyond the conversations held over a few days.

Since its inception, the platform has deliberately brought together the institutions that control different parts of the development equation: governments that shape policy, businesses and investors that deploy capital, development institutions that provide financing and risk mitigation, philanthropies that provide catalytic resources, and civil society organisations that understand communities and deliver solutions.

That approach has facilitated several strategic partnerships and helped unlock more than $1 billion in investment and development commitments through the ASIS platform and partnerships catalysed around it.

That figure matters because it demonstrates what can happen when convening is deliberately connected to financing and implementation. It also reinforces a fundamental point: Africa’s financing challenge is also an intermediation challenge.

Capital exists. Development needs exist. Investable opportunities exist. Institutions with the capacity to deliver exist.

Too often, however, they do not meet. Africa therefore needs stronger platforms and institutions capable of connecting capital to credible opportunities, moving partnerships from introductions to transactions, and taking promising interventions from grants to catalytic capital and ultimately to sustainable scale.

This must also change how we measure development convenings.

The success of a summit should not ultimately be measured by attendance, speeches or declarations. We should ask: How much capital moved? How many partnerships were activated? How many investment opportunities progressed? What policies changed? And what measurable development outcomes followed?
For ASIS, crossing the $1 billion threshold is significant, but it should be regarded as a beginning.

The scale of Africa’s financing requirements demands much more. The ambition must be to build pipelines and partnerships capable of mobilising billions more in public, private, philanthropic and development capital towards Africa’s most urgent priorities.

That is how we move from conversation to capital, and from capital to transformation.

But the conversation cannot stop in Lagos.

The Africa Social Impact Summit Global Action Forum, to be convened in New York during the 81st United Nations General Assembly, will take this conversation to the global stage under the theme “Financing Africa’s Future: Mobilising Capital, Strategic Partnerships and Collective Giving for Sustainable Development.”

The Forum will bring together governments, investors, development finance institutions, businesses, philanthropies and social impact organisations to deepen partnerships, connect Africa’s development priorities with global capital, and identify practical pathways for turning commitments into measurable outcomes.

The ambition is clear: to move from commitment to action and from ambition to measurable impact.

Ultimately, however, we must look beyond financing individual projects to financing the systems that make lasting progress possible. A school can educate children; a stronger education system can transform generations. A fund can support entrepreneurs; a functioning financial ecosystem can unlock thousands of businesses.

Projects solve individual problems. Systems change the conditions that create those problems.

Africa possesses the talent, resources, markets and opportunities to shape its own future. What is required now is the capital, institutions, partnerships and execution to turn that potential into shared prosperity.

Africa’s future will belong to those who can turn its development needs into investable opportunities, its partnerships into capital, and its capital into transformation.
And that is a future Africa must increasingly finance and lead for itself.

Read the remaining part of this article on www.guardian.ng

Ibekwe is the Chief Executive Officer of Sterling One Foundation, co-convener of the Africa Social Impact Summit (ASIS).