A Continent of 1.5 Billion People Issued 20 Corporate Bonds Last Year

Last Friday, with most of the market staring at U.S. inflation data, the OECD released a report that quantifies one of the strangest asymmetries in global finance. Africa accounts for 2.7% of world GDP and is home to nearly 1.5 billion people. Its companies' entire stock of market-based debt — every corporate bond and syndicated loan across all 54 countries — came to $211 billion at the end of 2025. That is 0.3% of the global total.

Strip out the loans and it gets starker. The continent's corporate bond market is roughly $35 billion. For scale: that is about the size of the debt stack a single U.S. AI cloud provider, CoreWeave, has assembled to build data centers — a comparison we made for different reasons three weeks ago. One American company, borrowing against GPUs, has tapped bond and credit markets for roughly what every listed company on the African continent has outstanding combined.

And the African number is shrinking. According to the OECD's Africa Capital Markets Report 2026, the continent's corporate bond market is 44% smaller in inflation-adjusted terms than it was at its 2015 peak. Companies across all 54 countries issued no more than 20 corporate bonds in all of 2025. Seventeen of them came from financial firms — banks borrowing to lend, not businesses borrowing to build.

A market in reverse

The detail in the report reads like a diagnosis of why capital doesn't compound where it's needed most:

• Concentration. Six countries — South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, Morocco, Mauritius, and Mozambique — account for 80% of all outstanding corporate debt. South Africa alone has been the largest market for 15 years running, holding about 30% of the total, roughly $63 billion.
• Decay at the former core. Egypt held 30% of Africa's corporate debt in 2010, nearly rivaling South Africa. Its share has more than halved since — driven, per the report, by a contraction in Egypt's own debt stock rather than growth elsewhere.
• Loans, not bonds. Syndicated loans make up 81% of the outstanding stock, and the loans signed in 2025 averaged about five years to maturity, versus 7.5 years in other emerging markets. African companies borrow shorter, in smaller numbers, from fewer lenders.
• Dollar dependence. Only 17% of corporate debt issued in 2025 was in local currency. A Nigerian or Kenyan company that borrows in dollars is short its own currency for the life of the loan — exactly the exposure that has repeatedly turned African corporate borrowers into distressed credits through no operational fault of their own.

The OECD's conclusion is blunt: capital markets on the continent "remain underutilised as a source of long-term finance," and the gap matters most precisely when global conditions tighten and foreign lenders retreat from anything labeled risky. With development aid to sub-Saharan Africa from OECD donor countries down more than 25%, the report argues, the cost of not having domestic capital markets is no longer theoretical.

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The paradox: the equity side is booming

Here is what makes this a story for investors rather than development economists: while the continent's bond market was shrinking, its stock markets had one of the best runs in the world.

African equity market capitalization rose 49% in 2025 — against roughly 20% for emerging markets broadly — and African exchanges have outperformed the MSCI Emerging Markets Index over the 2021–2026 stretch. The gains are concentrated (South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, and Morocco account for 88% of total market cap), but the direction is unambiguous. And the supply of investable assets is finally growing at the edges: Ethio Telecom listed on Ethiopia's brand-new securities exchange in May, Kenya Pipeline Company recently completed its IPO, and Nigeria's Dangote refinery drew retail subscriptions reported at multiples of its $1.6 billion target — an offer so oversubscribed the regulator let it stay open longer.

At the OECD's roundtable on Friday, Carmine Di Noia, the organization's director for financial and enterprise affairs, pointed at the number that should interest allocators most: three-quarters of Africa's large non-financial state-owned enterprises remain unlisted. That is the privatization pipeline of the next decade, sitting in plain sight.

So the question that actually matters for your money: if the equity rerating is real and the bond market is a decade behind it, what is the investable expression — and what are the tripwires?

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