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Catalyst for economic and climate resilience: who we are, what we stand for and who we work with.
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Thought leadership that empowers clients, industries, and society with insights that lead to innovation and progress.
Insight overviewAnalysis
Systems Capital Africa 2026 · The COP31 Gateway
A 60-minute roundtable at the Nigeria Pavilion on COP31’s Finance & Trade Day.
Programme brief
Africa’s flagship climate and infrastructure assets are financed almost entirely through development finance institutions and sovereign borrowing, while the continent’s own stock exchanges — and the pension funds, insurers and savers who invest through them — stand on the sidelines. The capital is there and growing, yet Africa accounts for less than 1% of global green-bond issuance, and without investable local assets much of its savings is placed abroad. Large projects are built, held and refinanced off-market, so exchanges are judged too small for major transactions and stay that way because those transactions never reach them.
Our problem is we don’t have point B.
This session, hosted by Nigeria’s National Council on Climate Change at the Nigeria Pavilion on COP31’s Finance & Trade Day, brings exchanges, DFIs, securities regulators and asset owners to one table. The aim is not to replace development finance but to build local markets into it: a listed tranche in every major DFI-led financing, yield vehicles for operating renewables, securitisations that recycle DFI capital to local pension funds, and cross-border listings that reach several markets at once.
The building blocks already exist — Nigeria’s sovereign green bonds list on NGX and FMDQ, Safaricom’s KES 20bn green bond drew 96% of applications from individual investors, and the AELP now links 11 African exchanges. What is missing is a deliberate pipeline, and the session is designed to leave with two or three pilot transactions and an agenda for COP32 in Addis Ababa.
The question
What role should Africa’s stock exchanges play alongside DFIs in mobilising capital for climate and development — and what would it take for a defined share of every major financing to go through local markets?
Five themes
| Theme | The question for the room | Reference point |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Crowding in | Could a fixed share — 5 to 15% — of every major DFI-led financing be offered through local markets? | Projects financed wholly by DFI loans; Nigeria’s sovereign green bonds listed on NGX and FMDQ |
| 2 · Equity alongside debt | Can listed, yield-paying vehicles take operating renewable assets off DFI and sponsor balance sheets? | YieldCos holding operating solar and power assets |
| 3 · Recycling DFI capital | What would it take to pool DFI-held, institutional-grade assets and list them for local pension funds? | Tower-receivables securitisation on the Ghana Stock Exchange; GuarantCo and InfraCredit credit enhancement |
| 4 · Liquidity and scale | Short of a single African exchange, how can products reach investors across several markets at once? | nuam, Nasdaq Nordic, Euronext; the AELP link across 11 African exchanges |
| 5 · Regulation and continuity | What must regulators and policymakers provide so that pipelines survive changes of government? | Domestic resource mobilisation as practice, not slogan |
Participation and outcomes
Partners
Host
National Council on Climate Change.
Co-convenor; transaction pipeline
Co-convenor and moderator
UN Sustainable Stock Exchanges Initiative.
Technical partner to NCCC
Systems Capital Africa 2026
Three mornings in Antalya during COP31, each building on the last.
Session by session, Antalya, 10, 13 and 14 November 2026.
Institutions and executives contributing to the Gateway mornings and the Finance & Trade Day roundtable.
The institutions convening the Gateway, and the ways to partner on it.
