Togo’s leader calls for African Capital to fund Africa’s future

At the Luanda Summit on infrastructure financing, Togolese President Faure Gnassingbé delivered a stark analysis of Africa’s development funding paradox. He highlighted that while the continent holds significant capital in its pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and domestic savings, these resources are largely invested outside Africa, often in low-yield assets.

The critical challenge, according to President Gnassingbé, is to redirect this internal capital toward vital regional infrastructure, industrial, and energy projects.

He called for bolder financial engineering, proposing public-private co-investment platforms and regional investment vehicles to pool risks and make large-scale projects more attractive to local institutional investors.

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This strategic shift is presented as essential for economic sovereignty. Investing in infrastructure like road corridors would directly reduce logistics costs, unlock new growth poles especially for landlocked nations and boost intra-African trade, aligning with the African Union’s connectivity goals.

For Togo, this vision underscores a consistent policy of pursuing regional integration and endogenous development, signaling a move away from dependency on external funding and toward the mobilization of Africa’s own financial resources for its own transformation.

Sonia Messanh