Is Africa a Good Place to Invest? A Practical Guide for Business Investors

The honest answer is: it depends on the country, the sector, the investment structure and the quality of local execution — and those four variables matter far more than any continent-level verdict.

The headline data shows genuine momentum alongside genuine fragility. UNCTAD's World Investment Report 2025 records foreign direct investment into Africa rising 75 per cent in 2024 to US$97 billion, lifting Africa's share of global FDI from 4 to 6 per cent. But UNCTAD attributes that jump largely to a single mega-project, the Ras El-Hekma urban development deal in Egypt. Net of the increase in Egypt, flows were up 12 per cent and stood at roughly US$62 billion — still around 4 per cent of global FDI.

The same report records declines beneath the headline: the number of greenfield investment projects fell 5 per cent and their value fell 37 per cent, while cross-border mergers and acquisitions turned negative, with net divestments of US$1.5 billion in 2024 against US$9.5 billion of net investment in 2023.

Read together, that is neither an emerging-market boom story nor a retreat. It is a set of markets where capital is concentrated, selective and increasingly attentive to specific opportunities rather than to the continent as a category. For a business investor, that is the correct posture to adopt as well.

Africa is 54 countries. They differ in economic structure, regulation, currency regime, political environment, infrastructure quality, market maturity, consumer purchasing power and the practical ease of doing business. A conclusion drawn in one market frequently does not transfer to its neighbour.

The regional distribution of investment makes the point. UNCTAD's 2025 Africa factsheet shows inward FDI stock concentrated very differently across North, West, East, Central and Southern Africa, with growth rates in 2024 ranging from under 2 per cent in West Africa to 11 per cent in East Africa. Country-level divergence within each region is wider still.

So the useful question is not "is Africa a good place to invest?" It is a narrower and more answerable set of questions.

Opportunity areas differ sharply by market, and none of the sectors below is uniformly attractive across the continent. They are listed because they recur in the commercial conversations we see across the Dubai–Accra corridor, not because they are universally strong.

The pattern worth noting is that many of the most practical opportunities are not capital-market opportunities at all. They involve converting a local resource, an unmet local demand or an underserved distribution gap into a business — which is work that requires an operator, not only an allocator.

Most published guidance on this question addresses listed securities: African stocks, frontier-market funds and ETFs. That is one route, and it is the route best served by existing financial media. It is not the route most companies and business owners are actually asking about.

For a business investor, investing in Africa usually means acquiring, building or backing an operating position in a specific market. The practical routes below differ substantially in capital requirement, control, speed and risk exposure.

Any credible assessment of African markets has to treat risk as a first-order subject rather than a closing caveat. The risks below are not hypothetical; they are the ordinary reasons that otherwise sound business cases fail in practice.

Desktop research reliably establishes what a market looks like at a national level. It rarely establishes whether your specific business will work in it.

Published data can tell you a country's GDP growth, population and import statistics. It generally cannot tell you what a comparable product currently sells for on the ground, which distributors actually deliver, which regulatory approval takes three weeks and which takes nine months, or whether a prospective partner's stated capability matches their operating reality.

That gap is why we treat market intelligence as a distinct piece of work preceding investment, rather than as background reading. In practice it covers a defined set of questions.

Ghana is not automatically the best African market for any given business, and no company should select it without testing it against alternatives for their specific sector. It is, however, frequently shortlisted as an entry point into West Africa, and there are structural reasons for that.

The African Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat is hosted by Ghana in Accra; the building was formally handed over and commissioned in August 2020. The AfCFTA agreement itself was adopted in March 2018 and entered into force in May 2019. The World Bank's analysis of the agreement describes it as creating the largest free trade area in the world by number of participating countries, connecting 1.3 billion people across 55 countries with a combined GDP valued at US$3.4 trillion — while noting that realising that potential depends on substantial policy reform and trade facilitation.

Beyond the institutional position, the practical characteristics companies weigh are Accra's depth of professional services, an English-language business and administrative environment, an established investment promotion framework administered by the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre, and regional and intercontinental connectivity — including a Dubai–Accra air corridor that has been expanding.

None of this substitutes for market-specific validation. It explains why Ghana is often a reasonable place to start looking, not a reason to stop looking.

ORTERRA operates across two hubs because the two halves of an African market investment usually sit in different places.

Dubai provides access to international companies, capital and investors, logistics and trade infrastructure, and global business networks — together with a credible base from which to hold and structure international activity.

Accra provides the other half: local market intelligence, business relationships, partner identification, execution capability, access to Ghana and a practical vantage point on wider West African opportunities.

ORTERRA is an independent business platform and consultancy. We are not a government body, an investment fund, or a regulated financial adviser, and nothing here implies government endorsement or affiliation.

The following checklist is deliberately blunt. If a proposed African investment cannot produce clear, evidenced answers to these questions, the correct response is to keep working rather than to commit capital.

Commitment should follow evidence. In practice, the sequence below lets a company build a defensible position at a fraction of the cost of entering at full scale and correcting later.

This article is general business and market commentary. It is not investment advice, it does not recommend any security or opportunity, and it makes no representation about returns. Every investment described here carries risk, including the risk of total loss. Companies and individuals should take independent legal, tax and financial advice appropriate to their circumstances before committing capital in any market.