Food, Phones, Roofs and Roads
A humid Tuesday in Lagos. A visiting allocator from London shifts in his chair each time the diesel generator growls back to life. “The whole region feels like one big headline hazard,” he says, scanning the windowless boardroom.
That single remark illustrates the most common misunderstanding in African investing: treating forty-plus countries and dozens of sectors as one volatile blur.
Myth-busting before the term sheet
- “Africa is a single market.” A tomato trucker travelling from Kano to Accra meets fourteen informal checkpoints. Nothing about that trip is uniform.
- “Commodity swings dictate everything.” Copper and crude often lead the news, yet most households worry about dinner, data, rent and deliveries — needs that barely pause for global price charts.
- “Coups shut business down.” Even during political flare-ups, governments scramble to keep food moving, phones ringing and trucks rolling because voters punish shortages faster than they punish ideology.
Agriculture: the meal ticket that rarely loses relevance
- Economic weight. McKinsey estimates farming provides roughly 23 percent of regional GDP and employs more than 60 percent of workers.
- Room to grow. Researchers calculate that the continent still holds about two-thirds of the world’s uncultivated arable land.
- Capital draw. In Q3 2024, agriculture absorbed close to four in five recorded African private-credit deals. British International Investment, Swedfund and Norfund underlined the trend with an eighty-five-million-dollar commitment to AgDevCo in February 2025.
Food budgets stay intact even when ministries reshuffle, giving farm assets a built-in political shield.
Telecoms: cashflow in a SIM card
The GSMA’s Mobile Economy Sub-Saharan Africa 2024 report lists 527 million unique mobile subscribers at the end of 2023 — about 44 percent of the population — with a projection of 751 million by 2030. Four-G connections should account for half the total, while five-G could unlock ten billion dollars in added GDP the same year. No president wants footage of citizens queuing for signal bars, so regulators usually tax telcos rather than disable them. Revenues priced in hard currency from towers, fibre routes and mobile-money rails sweeten the risk profile.
Real estate: roofs for the world’s fastest-growing cities
Knight Frank’s Africa Report 2024/25 points to regional growth of 3.8 percent in 2024 and 4.1 percent in 2025. Urban centres welcome about 32 million new residents each year, forcing landlords to re-price space in Accra, Dar es Salaam and Lusaka, often in dollars. Office and warehouse leases already follow that pattern, while build-to-rent housing expands as mortgage costs lock buyers out. Currency swings still hurt, but dollar-indexed contracts and mixed-use developments soften the blow.
Logistics: arteries for a continent learning to trade with itself
ALG Consulting records African container throughput rising from 22.8 million units in 2010 to 35.8 million in 2022 — a 57 percent jump. Kearney’s State of Logistics 2025 links upcoming corridor upgrades under the African Continental Free Trade Area to forecast regional GDP growth of about 3.7 percent next year. Ports, depots and last-mile fleets sit at the heart of every customs office, which means strikes are mediated quickly and assets stay operational even when parliament rows turn noisy.
Why these four sectors sidestep the worst shocks
- Everyday demand. Food, calls, shelter and freight are hard to boycott, even for angry crowds.
- Development-finance cover. The African Development Bank, World Bank and peer institutions extend guarantees across these industries, encouraging governments to honour contracts.
- Built-in hedges. Dollar leases at malls and ports, USD-linked voice and data tariffs, export-priced crops — each limits local-currency pain.
The takeaway for capital allocators
Political headlines will continue to flash. Yet across food supplies, telecom grids, city real estate and trade routes, service interruption carries a steep electoral cost, so administrations keep these systems running. Investors hunting steady cash flows with controlled headline risk are likely to find firmer footing in these four arenas than in raw commodities or long-dated power concessions.
The central question becomes clear: how many more growth cycles can global capital afford to miss while waiting for perfect calm?
