Africa’s public markets are in the noise

Before spinning Africa Eats out of Fledge last year, I spent a lot of time digging into the public stock markets of Africa, understanding what it means to be public on an exchange in an emerging market country. I’ve been buying and selling shares on public stock markets since the 1980s but only companies listed on the NYSE and NASDAQ.

This week I can across this infographic, showing the relative size of the public markets around the world:

Like the private markets I talked about last week, the public markets in Sub-Saharan Africa are so small that they not only don’t get a labeled sliver in the 12% pie slice that is Emerging Markets on that graph (which itself is skewed as China is part of that slice), but Kenya, Nigeria, and Mauritius are all so small that they didn’t even make it onto the long list of Other EM, all smaller than Peru and Pakistan, despite there being 200 million Nigerians and despite Mauritius being the second largest stock exchange in SSA.

Bottom line, if there is one thing well known about Capitalism is that capital doesn’t flow where it is most needed nor where investors can earn the biggest returns.

The GDP per capita metric is helpful to gauge the level of economic development within a region, but misleading in that the metric gets skewed by extraction-based industries like mining and oil (which is why Botswana, Namibia, and Gabon) are higher than their neighboring countries). Visual Capitalist has published a map of the per-capital GDPs of most of the African nations (in most cases rounded...

In today’s episode of Superpowers for Good, I had the pleasure of welcoming back a dear friend and visionary entrepreneur, Luni Libes, the CEO of Africa Eats. Luni is not only an inspiring leader but also a key investor in the super crowd. His innovative company, Africa Eats, is on a mission to end hunger and poverty in Africa through a unique for-profit model, currently crowdfunding on WeFunder...

My refrigerator died last week, and with that, my family and I lived with an “ice box” in its place, using frozen bottles of water as the source of cooling until today, when the new refrigerator was installed. Refrigeration is a service billions of us take for granted. Living without it for a week helps one ungrant that taking (or however that is supposed to be phrased). All of this...

Last month I was in Tanzania visiting three Africa Eats‘ investees: Swahili Honey, Goldenpot, and Rogathe Dairy. Below are three short videos showing off their factories. All of these companies have grown more than 10x since I first met them, some of them growing that fast in two years. See the post on fast-growing SMEs to see each of their growth stories, and click on the other companies...

1.4 billion people live in Africa. But that population is far from evenly distributed. The southern edge of the Sahara is clearly visible in West Africa, as is the enormous population in Nigeria. Then over in East Africa it is even denser in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and over into Rwanda around Lake Victoria and Lake Kivu, and yet denser still down in Malawi. See the original post on www...