Investors have been struggling to sell their stakes in African companies. With that being the case, new capital has stayed away. However, a permanent dollar-based fund listed in Africa, financed by African and US investors and built to buy out those seeking an exit, could change that and give the United States a rare opening.
European and multilateral development finance institutions (DFIs) spent two decades backing funds that bought African companies and rebuilt them to institutional standard, with audited accounts, international reporting, and governance that survives fiduciary diligence. Those funds have aged, and their backers need distributions. But the routes out remain narrow.
Boston Consulting Group found that from 2000 to 2023, trade sales took 47 percent of African private equity exits and sponsor-to-sponsor sales just 32 percent, against roughly 45 percent in mature markets. Exit activity rose in 2024 and 2025, but the exit-to-investment ratio stayed low, and trade buyers still dominated. When exits stall, capital does not recycle, distributions to investors slow, and successor funds become harder to raise. Africa’s binding constraint is no longer the quality of its investable companies but the infrastructure through which ownership of those companies can change hands efficiently at institutional scale. Market forces alone are unlikely to resolve that constraint.
The alternatives are thin. A secondaries and continuation-vehicle market is only beginning to form, and DFIs mostly trade among themselves, as CDC Group, now British International Investment, did in selling its stake in the Development Finance Company of Uganda to Impact Fund Denmark. That buyer pool is episodic, surfacing for specific deals rather than standing demand; a seller cannot count on it when the clock runs out.
Public listings are narrower still, and the bigger exchanges fail not on depth but on currency. Johannesburg is deep but rand-denominated; Nairobi serves local-currency investors; and both carry exchange-rate risk. Mauritius forms and administers funds rather than trading mature assets. London offers dollar liquidity but suits large issuers and a London listing does nothing to build African market infrastructure or bring African institutions into ownership. There is no venue where a hard-currency buyer and a private equity seller can meet on terms either will accept.
One operating exchange can pilot the fix. The Victoria Falls Stock Exchange (VFEX) sits within the developing Victoria Falls International Financial Centre, a Zimbabwean framework chaired by American banker Marc Holtzman, whose 2026 regulations create a dedicated regime for banking, securities, funds, and insurance. VFEX settles in US dollars and treats disinvestment proceeds and dividends as free funds, exempt from exchange-control surrender. It is the only venue that combines dollar settlement, statutory dollar repatriation, an African domicile that invites African institutions to co-own the platform, and a listing regime a mid-sized vehicle can realistically meet.
The US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) could anchor a cornerstone stake in a permanent-capital vehicle listed on VFEX, buying stakes from funds that must exit aging holdings. Critically, the exit does not depend on VFEX turnover: An exiting fund would be paid from the vehicle’s primary raise—the DFC cornerstone alongside African pension funds, insurers, and sovereign investors, and, in turn, US pensions, endowments, and family offices. Because the vehicle would be open-ended, it would fund each successive acquisition by issuing new shares to incoming investors, who receive pro-rata ownership of the assets acquired. Its capacity would therefore be bounded by its ability to place shares, not by secondary turnover on the exchange. The listing would do a different job: It would convert locked, closed-end interests into a priced, tradable, hard-currency instrument with net asset value transparency. The DFC’s own stake would be a capped minority tranche with a disclosed sell-down path.
This would fit the DFC’s mandate. The agency already provides equity, guarantees, and political-risk insurance and applies an additionality test: Its support must mobilize capital that would not otherwise deploy. A cornerstone commitment would do exactly that, drawing private US institutions in alongside African capital well beyond the DFC’s own stake. This would give American investors a scalable route into mature, institutionally governed African companies while deepening commercial ties and accelerating the growth of African capital markets.
The strategic return runs wider than portfolio access. Once the structure is proven, it can be replicated as sector-targeted vehicles—critical minerals, infrastructure, agribusiness, financial services, healthcare—giving Washington a market-based channel into sectors where US strategic interest and African capital needs already align. In critical minerals in particular, Washington has begun taking ownership positions rather than lending alone, but it has done so through closed private consortia. A listed vehicle would do something those cannot: It would open the same exposure to the broader base of US pensions, endowments, and insurers; price it daily; and give those investors a route out. It builds American commercial presence through ownership rather than aid, aligns the United States with African co-investors as partners rather than donors, and gives American investors standing in assets that state-directed capital is otherwise positioned to take up.
Of course, the demand-side case is important. US institutions hold little Africa-focused private equity, even though limited partners—the pension funds, endowments, insurers, and sovereign investors who supply capital to private equity funds—report real confidence in the assets. Industry surveys track where these investors intend to allocate capital and what deters them. The obstacles are structural: weak exit routes, fragmented exposure, currency volatility, uneven governance, and the burden of overseeing scattered direct investments across jurisdictions.
A diversified, permanent-capital vehicle answers those objections at once: dollar-denominated and dollar-settled shares, international audits, common governance standards, statutory repatriation of proceeds, and a single platform for exposure to mature African companies. A listing adds regular pricing and a route to liquidity, though depth still depends on free float, market-making, and sustained institutional demand. The DFC’s cornerstone would not remove those risks, but it certifies additionality and mobilizes capital that would not otherwise enter.
VFEX is, admittedly, a shallow market. Opened in 2020, it carries a market capitalization near $8.3 billion and a roster of fewer than twenty mostly Zimbabwean counters, with liquidity thin enough that positions are easier to build than to unwind. But because sellers are paid from primary capital, thin secondary trading does not block the exit at the point of sale. It bears on the incoming investor’s eventual route out, where even a shallow listed vehicle beats unlisted private equity. The DFC cannot manufacture turnover, but it can supply the conditions for depth: genuine free float, international reporting standards, independent directors, valuation discipline, a liquidity provider and, where its authorities allow, a market-maker line.
The risks are real. One listed vehicle is not a market; depth requires more issuers and resident African buyers that Washington does not control. Dollar denomination neutralizes exchange-rate risk but not convertibility risk: The free-funds treatment rests on a statutory instrument, and Zimbabwe has restricted access to foreign-currency balances before, when reserves tightened. Sanctions are the lesser concern. In March 2024, the United States replaced its country-wide program with targeted designations, removing the blanket legal barrier but not the duty of diligence. The answer is to underwrite the vehicle, not the sovereign: ring-fence custody and cash flows, phase disbursement against governance and listing milestones, and treat the exchange’s shallowness as the problem the vehicle exists to solve. Framed as a commercially governed, rules-based market open to global investors on equal terms, it is defensible.
The companies are no longer the missing piece. What is missing is a market where ownership can change hands efficiently, transparently, and at institutional scale. Building it should be a shared project: African pension funds and sovereign investors bring local knowledge and long-horizon capital; American investors bring global scale and dollar depth. Development finance spent two decades building African companies. The next decade can be defined by African and American capital building African markets together. That is how Africa’s exit problem becomes America’s entry point.
Simbai Chizengeni is founder of Mukundi Investments Capital, a corporate finance and private equity advisory firm, and a doctoral student in public policy (economic policy) at Liberty University’s Helms School of Government. He has no commercial interest in VFEX, the Victoria Falls International Financial Centre, or any vehicle of the kind described here.
The Africa Center works to promote dynamic geopolitical partnerships with African states and to redirect US and European policy priorities toward strengthening security and bolstering economic growth and prosperity on the continent.
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