Africa does not have a savings problem. It has a deployment problem. That is the core argument Mohammed Abdul-Razaq, Senior Vice President and Head of Capital Mobilisation and Partnerships at the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC), has been making since the inaugural Africa We Build Summit concluded in Nairobi on April 24, and it is an argument backed by a set of numbers that are increasingly difficult to dismiss.
Pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth funds across the continent collectively hold trillions of dollars in assets under management. Yet a disproportionate share remains invested in government securities rather than infrastructure. In Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, the National Pension Commission reported a pension industry valued at approximately 29.4 trillion naira as of February 2026, with roughly 60 percent invested in government debt and less than 10 percent in corporate or productive assets. Meanwhile, the country’s infrastructure deficit is projected to reach $878 billion by 2040. The savings exist. The need exists. The architecture to connect them largely does not.
Abdul-Razaq describes this as a paradox the AFC is determined to resolve. Speaking on the sidelines of the summit, he said approximately 90 percent of infrastructure projects in Africa fail at the development stage, which is precisely where the AFC deploys its most critical function: absorbing early-stage risk through blended finance so that pension funds and institutional investors can enter later with the same confidence they would apply to a government bond. The institution’s leverage model targets between five and ten dollars of private and domestic capital for every dollar of AFC capital deployed.
The AFC’s strategy rests on three distinct pillars. The first is de-risking, using its balance sheet to make entry viable for risk-averse domestic investors. The second is standardisation, ensuring project structures are transparent and bankable to international standards. The third is advocacy, working directly with regulators and finance ministries to reform prudential frameworks that currently prevent institutional investors from meaningfully allocating to infrastructure. Abdul-Razaq was unambiguous on this point, arguing that regulatory inertia must not remain a barrier between African savings and African growth.
His broader argument addresses the continent’s historical reliance on external financing, which he says carries structural vulnerabilities that the turbulence of the 2020s has repeatedly exposed. Pandemics, rising interest rate cycles, and geopolitical conflicts dried up external financing flows overnight. A deep, liquid domestic capital market, he said, can fund infrastructure regardless of conditions in New York, London, or Beijing. He calls this financial sovereignty.
To make progress measurable, the AFC plans to publish a Domestic Capital Mobilisation Index tracking, country by country, how much infrastructure investment is being funded from local sources. The stated aim is to make progress visible and inaction uncomfortable.
For the first time, Abdul-Razaq said, finance ministers, central bank governors, pension fund trustees, and private equity managers are converging around a shared vocabulary on infrastructure financing. That convergence of intent, absent five years ago, is what makes the current moment different. Whether it translates into deployment at scale will determine how much of Africa’s infrastructure gap is closed in this decade.