Chinelo Anohu-Amazu Quotes

Around sports you have the merchandising, you have the whole ecosystem, the infrastructure and for those watching these sports, the hotels, the shops, the licensing. This is why people are paying billions for sports franchises.

But we want to look at it more than just an athlete or a singer. We are looking to creating the framework so that we monetise the IP. Others are currently making money from our talent.

Talent is not the issue on the continent. We have it in abundance. We are naturally blessed in sports and in the creatives.

The same principles that we discussed earlier still need to be applied to these sectors. Thinking about scale, structuring projects properly, creating awareness around the impact and upside.

First let me say that risks do exist. It would be naive and totally idealistic for anyone to say that political risk doesn’t exist. But it exists everywhere. The point is that it’s not going to go away. What we need are the tools to manage it so that it doesn’t become a problem. What we do on the AIF side is to ensure that we unlock these bottlenecks and sometimes it’s a political bottleneck, sometimes it’s a policy bottleneck. Sometimes it’s a data or business intelligence bottleneck because you can’t invest if you don’t understand your terrain, if you don’t have reliable numbers.

They sit in the room with investors, they sit in the room with project sponsors and they hear first-hand how their intentions, their concerns, how policies affect the investments. And investors also get a better understanding of policy. It helps with decision making and we have seen leaders go back to work on policy to help drive greater investments and get deals over the line. That is the unique proposition of the AIF.

One should understand that when the presidents come to the AIF they don’t come to AIF as the president of such and such a country, they come to AIF as CEOs of their countries.

It is always incumbent on the project sponsors and the advisors to structure the deals in a manner that you accompany the interests of the country you operate in. That’s what differentiates success and frustration.

We are uniquely placed to overcome all of these different items. We work with every government on the continent. So we can help smooth out issues around policy through discussions and sensitisation and through reforms. We also have proprietary data through the African Development Bank.

I also think we need to be more ambitious. You see projects and they are too timid, too small. International investors and financiers want scale. So we also help see the bigger picture and help ensure that these projects are appealing and will meet the requirements and benchmarks that we know investors will request.

The issue we have found are the project themselves, the way they’re structured and the way they are prepared. We have noticed that you can have some fantastic projects but they are structure is wrong and they don’t have the basic corporate governance structures that make them investible from an investor’s perspective.

On the domestic front, can I just say that the driver behind the pension reform we conducted was to ignite that domestic resource mobilisation. And across the continent, we haven’t even started to scratch the surface on that front. Just look at contributions as a percentage of GDP and it’s still small comparatively speaking. So there is capital.

One of the biggest challenges is project preparation. You can always find capital and it is available both domestically and globally.

It’s a start, we’ll need a lot more, but this is something that is very exciting to us at the Africa Investment Forum, because it clearly charts a path where we can have a collaborative effort and ensure that deals on the continent have fruition.

Project preparation and due diligence is very important.