When I was a child in Cameroon, I learned a strange contradiction at school.
One day, our teacher explained:
“Cameroon has an immensely rich subsoil. Deposits of oil and gas, cobalt, bauxite, gold, diamonds, and iron. Our soils are so fertile that we could feed more than half of Central Africa.”
The next day, the same teacher said:
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“Cameroon is a developing country. We are poor and heavily indebted.”
Even as a child, this didn’t seem very coherent to me. Are we so mediocre and unworthy? How can a country with so much wealth be so poor?
I saw the same contradiction in my village. A man I knew — let’s call him Papa Jonas — owned hectares of fertile land. By any reasonable measure, he controlled assets worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yet he lived in a modest house and couldn’t afford his children’s education.
He wasn’t lazy. He had wealth. He simply couldn’t use it.
This is the contradiction that haunts Africa. The continent holds 30% of the world’s mineral reserves and 60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land that could feed much of the planet. Yet families like Papa Jonas’s live in what looks like poverty.
Africa is not poor. Africa is illiquid.
What “illiquid” really means
Liquidity is the ability to turn an asset into cash — quickly and without losing value.
A U.S. Treasury bond is liquid. It can be sold in seconds. You get the market price.
Land in a Cameroonian village may be worth $100,000. But if you need money next week, you have a problem. Finding a buyer takes months. Sell in a rush, and you lose half the value.
The difference is not about how much value exists. It’s about how easily that value can circulate.
Papa Jonas didn’t need more land. He needed a way to convert his land into money. But the system didn’t allow it. The land wasn’t registered. No bank would accept it as collateral. His wealth was real — but frozen.
This is the hidden reality across Africa. Assets exist. Value is real. But wealth cannot circulate.
How wealth gets frozen
Most African economies operate with a banking model inherited from the colonial era. Banks take deposits and give loans. That’s it.
In contrast, in a liquid financial system, assets move constantly. A pension fund in California buys bonds in Indonesia. When one exits, another enters. The market never stops — it is in perpetual motion.
In much of Africa, markets stall. A government bond may only be traded a few times a year. The IMF has documented this: in advanced economies, bond turnover often exceeds 100% per year. In many African markets, it falls below 20%.
This difference is not about risk. It’s about architecture.
The same applies to minerals. Cameroon has cobalt and oil. But these resources are extracted, exported, and priced in London or New York. The physical wealth leaves the country. The financial wealth never arrives.
How tokenization can help unlock wealth
This is where tokenization comes in. Not as a magic solution, but as a practical tool to unlock trapped value.
Tokenization is the digital representation of an asset on a shared ledger. Instead of a land title sitting in a government office, proof of ownership becomes a digital token — verifiable, transferable, and divisible.
For Papa Jonas, his land could be divided into small shares. He could sell a fraction to an investor in another city and use the money for his children.
For a cocoa farmer, a warehouse receipt could become a token usable as collateral for a loan or sellable to a distant buyer.
For a small business, an unpaid invoice could become a digital claim transferable in days.
Tokenization does not create wealth. It changes how value moves. It makes assets divisible, ownership transferable, and settlement faster.
Africa’s problem is not a lack of value. It is a lack of mechanisms to circulate that value. Tokenization provides one such mechanism.
What would a liquid Africa look like?
Imagine an Africa where value flows freely.
In this liquid Africa, Papa Jonas would have his land registered on a transparent digital system. He could sell a fraction to an investor in another city and keep the rest for his children. The land wouldn’t move — only the claim on it would.
A cocoa farmer would deposit her harvest in a certified warehouse. The warehouse would issue a digital token. She could use that token as collateral for a loan or sell it to a buyer in Europe. She would get better prices because she wouldn’t be forced to sell immediately.
A small business in Douala with a 90-day invoice would convert it into a digital token and sell it at a small discount. The money would arrive within days.
Beyond these examples, a liquid Africa would undergo a deeper transformation. Governments and economies would become far less dependent on foreign capital and international financial circuits. Why? Because the wealth sitting idle on the continent — land, natural resources, businesses, real estate — could finally be mobilized locally.
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Today, a country like Cameroon borrows on international markets at high rates because its own resources cannot be used as collateral. With tokenization, a state could tokenize part of its mineral resources or infrastructure. These tokens could be sold to citizens, the diaspora, and local pension funds. Capital would be raised locally, without foreign intermediaries. Dependence on international financial institutions would decrease. Economic sovereignty would increase.
A liquid Africa is an Africa that uses its own wealth to finance its own development.
None of this requires magic. It’s about building systems that recognize existing value, make ownership verifiable, and enable transferability.
The land is there. The minerals are there. The people are there.
What’s missing is the architecture to make this wealth circulate.
Tokenization can help build that architecture.
The rest depends on us.
Charles Awanda is an innovation and blockchain finance expert, CEO of Songhai Labs. He grew up in Cameroon and worked for leading technology companies in the United States before focusing on transforming African financial systems. He is the author of the upcoming book Tokenizing Africa: Digital Assets, Sovereignty, and the Re-Architecture of Capital.