Washington, DC — The inaugural Africa Business Investment Summit saw a target of $500m of structured commitments, a royal keynote and an unusually candid accounting of why capital still hesitates.
Otumfuo Osei Tutu II had been speaking for barely five minutes when he put the question the rest of the day would attempt to answer. The Asantehene looked out at the ballroom and asked why, given everything that had just been claimed for the continent, Africa is still not developed.
It was a striking thing to ask at a summit built to answer it. The Africa Business Investment Summit, convened for the first time by the Millennium Excellence Foundation under his patronage, gathered more than 500 delegates at MGM National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on 27 and 28 August. It was designed, in the words of Ghana’s Deputy Minister for Trade, Agribusiness and Industry, Sampson Ahi, as a deal-making arena, one in which discussion must lead to capital, capital to enterprise, and enterprise to jobs.
The organisers arrived with roughly $4 billion of opportunities and set themselves a smaller test: at least $500m in structured commitments, signed as memoranda of understanding and letters of intent before the delegates go home.
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Speaking for President John Dramani Mahama, Ahi set the scene for the day’s discussions with an update on Ghana’s progress. He reported inflation down from 23.8% in December 2024 to 5.4% a year later, and 4.6% by July 2026. GDP grew 6% in 2025, the fastest since 2019, with non-oil growth at 7.6%, the highest in fourteen years. Foreign direct investment reached $2.62bn.
That last number is the registration figure. The balance of payments tells a subtler story. Net foreign direct investment on that measure was $1.91bn, and 95.4% of it came from reinvested earnings, leaving something in the order of $88m of genuinely new money arriving from abroad. Investors already in Ghana are staying and expanding. Persuading new ones through the door is the harder problem.
It is also the problem almost every session that followed was arguing about.
Reta Jo Lewis, the former president and chair of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, gave the most practical account. During her three years leading the agency, she said, its Africa portfolio went from $109m in 2022 to a record $3.6bn in authorisations across 2023 and 2024. The constraint was rarely capital. It was readiness.
She has little patience for the language investors use. “The minute somebody tells me, do you have a bankable project, I already know they’re about to tell me they’re not going to do my deal.”
The financing conversation has to be part of a project’s design, not a question asked after it. “Let’s get to yes, not get to no.”
Critical minerals
One area that is expected to drive Africa’s development forward in the decades to come is exploitation of the continent’s enormous critical minerals reserves.
Africa’s mineral endowment is not in dispute and neither, said Ben Kincaid, chief executive of ReElement Technologies Africa, is the political will. Governments have written policies restricting the export of unprocessed material. What is missing is the midstream. Without regional refining capacity, a rule against exporting concentrate is unenforceable, because there is nowhere else for the concentrate to go.
Ayo Sopitan, chief executive of Metalex Commodities, which is building copper and cobalt production in Zambia, put the scale in perspective. By his count roughly 750 million tonnes of copper have been produced in all of human history, and the world will need about as much again within twenty-five years. The US Geological Survey’s own estimate of cumulative production is nearer 700 million tonnes.
Meanwhile, China is already securing vast supplies of critical minerals from Africa and restricting its own exports. It restricted antimony exports in 2024 and extended controls to refining technologies themselves in October 2025, covering smelting, separation and magnet manufacturing.
Those October measures were suspended for a year after the Busan meeting between the American and Chinese presidents, though the earlier controls remain.
For the West to compete, said the panel, capital cannot be the only answer. The US and other countries must boost processing capacity as well as extraction of the ore if they are to play a meaningful role in Africa’s critical minerals space.
Remittances are another area of huge potential. They are now Africa’s largest single source of external finance, at over $124bn in 2025 against roughly $70bn of foreign direct investment, while bilateral aid from OECD donors to sub-Saharan Africa fell by more than a quarter last year. In Ghana, central bank governor Johnson Asiama put 2025 inflows at nearly $7.8bn, about 6% of GDP, and said they now exceed foreign direct investment.
Rebecca Enonchong, founder of AppsTech, added the uncomfortable corollary. Sending money to sub-Saharan Africa costs about 8.5% on the World Bank’s measure once currency conversion is counted, even where the visible fee is two dollars. Governments have not always helped. A mobile money tax penalises the digital transfer while leaving cash untouched, she noted; Ghana repealed its own e-levy last year. Her broader warning was about dependency. When a government comes to assume the diaspora will cover healthcare, remittances have stopped being a private transfer and become a substitute for the state.
Energy – utilities must step up
Energy closed the day. Rachel Moré-Oshodi of ARM-Harith Infrastructure Investments argued that infrastructure is among the lowest-risk asset classes globally and that Africa’s loss rates, at around 1.7%, are the lowest anywhere. Her own firm, even so, has not closed a large-scale generation project in roughly seven years, because bankability depends on offtakers, and the utilities that sign those contracts are frequently not creditworthy.
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Chantelle Abdul, whose MOJEC International Holdings describes itself as sub-Saharan Africa’s largest manufacturer of smart electricity meters, recalled arriving in Nigeria to find utilities issuing estimated bills to customers who had been away for months. Almost half of sub-Saharan Africa still has no electricity at all. Nigeria’s self-generation capacity, she said, is around ten times what the national grid actually delivers.
Mission 300, the World Bank and African Development Bank programme, aims to connect 300 million Africans by 2030. More than $50bn has been pledged, the two banks accounting for $48bn of it, and just over 50 million people have been connected so far.
Time for action
But Kwabena Osei-Sarpong of RIFE International named the gap the whole summit had been circling. There are capital commitments, and there is capital deployment, and the distance between them is where most announcements go to die.
Which is the fair test of this summit.
Day Two ends with a signing ceremony for memoranda of understanding, letters of intent and an investment communiqué – but follow-through will prove more significant than mere announcements.
The Africa Business and Investment Summit was organized by the Millenium Excellence Foundation. African Business was a media partner and producer of the Summit.
