Africa

1. US steps up investment
2. Dangote prepares for IPO
3. S. Africa to boost refining
4. Investors eye health sector
5. Private credit surge
6. Weekend Reads

The inaugural pan-African architecture biennale

US ramps up investment

The Trump administration will lend $100 million to US-owned African telecoms firm Africell as Washington looks to displace Chinese companies as regional competition between the two superpowers heats up. The company operates in Angola, DR Congo, The Gambia, and Sierra Leone. The Africell deal will help “American and allied suppliers” develop infrastructure to counter China’s Huawei, Reuters reported. Africell told Semafor the loan would enable it to “continue expanding ambitiously in Angola.”

Beijing and Washington are also vying for supremacy in Africa’s mining industry: The US this week announced plans to develop a major critical minerals processing facility in Kenya, which is believed to harbor tens of billions of dollars’ worth of rare earths, an industry over which China has a tight grip. Kenya is reported to have large, untapped deposits of minerals required to build infrastructure for renewable energy and digital technologies, including copper, graphite, lithium, and nickel. The agreement is a boost for President William Ruto, who has burnished his ties with Western leaders, and made local processing of resources a key plank in his bid for a second term in next year’s election.

— Alexis Akwagyiram

Dangote Refinery set for IPO

The initial public offering of the Dangote Refinery in Nigeria will open on Monday, in what is set to be the largest debut on any African stock exchange. The company, owned by Africa’s richest man Aliko Dangote, began operations in 2024 and is taking steps to double capacity to 1.4 million barrels per day.

Dangote’s plant is currently the largest one in the world that uses a single crude distillation unit. The planned upgrade will add a second unit, to make it the outright largest refinery in the world, surpassing India’s Jamnagar Refinery owned by billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries. In addition to its dominance of fuel supply in Nigeria, Dangote has helped drive a seven-fold increase in petroleum product shipments from Nigeria since 2023, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

One prominent Nigerian economist estimates that the refinery will drive a two-fold increase in GDP to $600 billion by 2030. FirstCap, an investment bank involved in the IPO, said Europe’s ongoing shift away from Russian fuels will “reinforce medium-term demand” for the refinery’s output, and expects sustained demand from West African markets.

— Alexander Onukwue

S. Africa to triple oil refining

South Africa announced plans to at least triple its oil refining capacity, the latest country on the continent to make moves to boost its energy independence. The war in the Middle East has exposed Africa’s reliance on energy imports, which account for around 70% of the continent’s refined fuel needs. In response, several countries have made moves to boost their refining capacity: Africa’s richest man recently announced he would build a mega-facility in Kenya modeled on the continent’s biggest refinery in Nigeria — which he owns. Countries have also boosted their adoption of renewable energy, helping millions access reliable electricity for the first time. Think tank Ember projected Africa’s adoption of solar panels would rise by 45% this year.

Investors eye Nigerian healthcare

Nigerians are on track to spend $34 billion on healthcare this year, nearly double the amount spent five years ago, a new report found. The non-profit Health Federation of Nigeria said spending will climb to $52 billion by 2030.

Healthcare investors are positioning to take advantage of untapped commercial opportunities in the sector. “We want to move healthcare from just a social need that needs to be funded by philanthropists and governments to a real asset class,” Dr Ola Brown, CEO of HealthCap, a venture capital firm that has backed a dozen African health and fintech companies, told Semafor.

Pan-African private equity firm LeapFrog Investments sold its stake in East Africa’s largest pharmacy chain Goodlife Pharmacy last year to record the largest private equity-led retail pharmacy exit in sub-Saharan Africa outside South Africa. Investment Funds for Health in Africa, a Dutch private equity fund with nearly $200 million in assets, has recorded 10 exits from investments, two of them in Nigeria.

Semafor is expanding its coverage of healthcare with a new weekly briefing led by veteran healthcare journalist David Lim. At the intersection of politics, policy, and business, Semafor Healthcare will bring clarity to the forces shaping the industry, explaining how decisions in government affect the private sector and global economy. The briefing will go beyond the headlines to show what is really driving health policy in the US and around the world.

Each week, readers will get original reporting, scoops, and analysis on the people and institutions driving change across healthcare, from policymakers and major companies to scientists, investors, and technology leaders.

Private credit’s African opportunity

Private credit is on a rapid rise in Africa. Loans made by investment funds and other non-bank investors rather than traditional banks grew more than threefold in five years to $5.6 billion at the end of 2025, according to a new Moody’s report. But that represents just 0.3% of the $1.8 trillion global private credit market.

The bigger opportunity may be in pooling African loans, say the report’s authors. Development-finance institutions can take on some of the risk in the loans, making the safer portion attractive to pension funds, insurers and other large global investors that might otherwise stay away. Moody’s expects these structures to attract much larger pools of private capital into Africa.

That could make private credit an important source of long-term financing for infrastructure and businesses that banks cannot or will not fund. African banks are constrained by government borrowing and shallow domestic savings, while the continent faces an infrastructure financing gap estimated at up to $100 billion a year.

— Yinka Adegoke

Weekend Reads

• There are two fundamental misconceptions about Nigerian politics, writes Christopher Ogunmodede for World Politics Review, as Nigeria’s 2027 general election candidates begin to cross the country in search of votes. Those who claim Nigerian politicians lack ideas or that Nigerian parties have no set ideology make a definitional error in conflating politics with elections, parties and campaigns. The other fundamental error, according to Ogunmodede, comes when Nigerian politics is compared to a highly institutionalized political framework derived from the West.

• The rules of development for the world’s lower-income nations, including those in Africa, are changing, Tufts University political science professor Michael Beckley writes for Foreign Policy. Rather than simply riding the wave of Western demand and Chinese investment, many African countries are now facing higher tariffs compared to many wealthier nations, easy credit is now materializing as oppressive debt, and aid has been slashed. To get around this problem, Africa needs to leverage the assets it already has, Beckley writes, whether that’s ports, oil, or critical minerals, and remove internal barriers that prevent existing industries from growing.

• Africa’s renewable energy boom risks creating a power sector that is financed locally but owned elsewhere, argues a MIT Sloan essay. Linda Mabhena-Olagunju, an energy executive, writes that “Africa is not building an energy sector. It is warehousing one for someone else,” as the bigger problem isn’t simply the cost of capital but the lack of project preparation, local balance-sheet capacity and procurement systems that allow African developers to compete. Without fixing those gaps, the continent risks missing out on the value of its own energy transition.

• The gulf between postgraduate academic research and new commercial ventures offers an opportunity to connect the dots between some of the continent’s most educated and economic development, Abejide Ade-Ibijola writes in a London School of Economics blog. A researcher may spend years understanding a difficult problem, and the solution may involve a specialist technology, framework, dataset, or algorithm that universities rarely screen for commercial value. Rather than simply graduating into a limited job market with a specific set of skills, researchers should also be able to ask: “What can I build because of what I now know?” Ade-Ibijola writes.

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