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Gulf investors anchor Morocco’s $35 billion green hydrogen drive

14 October 2026 Comments (0) Business

ACWA Power Khalladi wind farm turbines, northern Morocco

The ‘Morocco Offer’: A State-Led Bet on Clean Energy Export

Morocco has been developing a national green hydrogen strategy since 2021, positioning the kingdom as a future exporter of hydrogen derivatives to European markets. The strategy rests on the country’s considerable solar and wind resources: according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), Morocco is on course to achieve the third lowest green hydrogen production costs in the world by 2050, with projected costs ranging between roughly $0.7 and $1.4 per kilogram, placing it alongside a handful of resource-rich nations in the most competitive tier.

The centrepiece of that strategy is what Rabat calls the ‘Morocco Offer,’ a state-led initiative launched in 2024 to channel large-scale foreign investment into hydrogen production and derivative industries, offering preferential access to public land and associated infrastructure. In March 2025, Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch chaired a steering committee that selected five investor groups for six specific projects, together valued at approximately $32 to $35 billion, according to AGBI and Morocco World News. The selected projects target production of green ammonia, e-fuels and clean steel, all within the kingdom’s southern provinces.

By February 2026, the programme moved from project selection to concrete land commitments. On 5 February, Akhannouch met in Rabat with representatives of all five investor groups to sign preliminary land reservation agreements. Each project gained access to up to 30,000 hectares, according to Ecofin Agency, enabling consortia to formally launch feasibility studies and move into active development.

Gulf Energy Companies Make Their Commitments Concrete

Two of the five selected investor groups carry direct Gulf capital, and their participation illustrates how the programme has become a practical Africa-Gulf energy partnership.

TAQA Morocco,  a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi National Energy Company, joined forces with Spain’s Moeve in a consortium focused on green ammonia and industrial e-fuels. Under the arrangement, TAQA Morocco is responsible for renewable energy generation underpinning the project, while Moeve leads e-fuels production and marketing. In its initial phase, the consortium expects to produce around 100,000 tonnes of hydrogen per year, converting that output into approximately 560,000 tonnes of green ammonia for both domestic use and export, according to a Moeve press release issued in February 2026.

Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power entered the programme with its ‘Green Pearl’ project. The company is not a newcomer to Morocco: its total investments in the kingdom’s renewable energy sector already stand at close to $3 billion, making it one of the country’s largest foreign energy investors. As of late June 2026, ACWA Power’s management in Morocco confirmed to Asharq Business that the company is actively seeking to expand into green hydrogen, seawater desalination and energy storage, per Morocco World News. That statement, made during a visit to its Khalladi wind farm, signals a deepening commercial relationship rather than a one-off transaction.

The logic driving Gulf participation is strategic as well as financial. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are both diversifying their portfolios into clean-energy value chains expected to define the post-oil economy. Morocco, positioned at the western edge of North Africa with Atlantic deep-water ports and close proximity to European markets, offers geography well suited to that ambition. For Gulf energy majors, co-developing projects in Morocco is also a way to secure off-take relationships and supply chain positions before competitors do.

Local Stakes and the Industrialisation Imperative

The scale of the programme raises a question that runs through nearly every large infrastructure initiative on the continent: who captures the value?

Morocco’s government has framed the ‘Morocco Offer’ as more than an export platform. The kingdom’s hydrogen strategy envisions a domestic market of 4 terawatt hours alongside an export market of 10 TWh by 2030, requiring the construction of 6 gigawatts of new renewable capacity, as outlined by the Green Hydrogen Organisation. That production base is intended to feed domestic industries: green ammonia substituting for costly fertiliser imports, and clean hydrogen eventually feeding emerging steelmaking capacity. Morocco’s target of reaching 52% renewable electricity by 2030 adds domestic demand that reduces the risk of projects becoming purely export-oriented enclaves.

The feasibility study phase now under way will be critical in determining whether local industrialisation ambitions are written into binding contractual terms, including local content requirements, workforce development obligations and technology transfer commitments. Morocco’s Ministry of Energy Transition, led by Leïla Benali, has consistently stressed these conditions in parliamentary statements, though the detailed terms of individual project agreements remain commercially confidential.

The timeline is also demanding. Most projects target first exports by the late 2020s or early 2030s, coinciding with when the European Union’s hydrogen import strategy is expected to generate significant commercial pull. For Gulf investors experienced in financing long-horizon energy infrastructure in complex regulatory environments, such timelines are familiar terrain. For Morocco, the stakes reach further: the programme’s credibility as a global investment destination depends on whether the first projects are delivered on schedule and on the terms originally promised to investors and citizens alike.

What has changed in 2026 is that ambitions long confined to policy documents have been backed by signed land agreements, launched feasibility studies and companies committing capital on the record. ACWA Power’s latest signal of expanded ambitions in Morocco suggests that the Africa-Gulf green hydrogen axis is moving beyond the era of strategic announcements into one of practical implementation.

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African GovTech Crosses Borders: Digital ID Systems Eye MENA Markets

5 October 2026 Comments (0) Business

Biometric ID enrollment process at an African government service centre

The scale of Africa’s digital identity infrastructure push is often underestimated outside the continent. Nigeria’s National Identity Management Commission had enrolled more than 100 million citizens in its National Identification Number (NIN) system by 2023, according to official government statements. Ghana’s biometric national identity card scheme, managed by the National Identification Authority, has reached near-universal coverage among adults in the country’s urban centres. Rwanda, consistently cited in World Bank and African Development Bank assessments as a regional benchmark for e-government, has integrated its national ID system with the Irembo platform, which allows citizens to access over a hundred public services online.

Morocco sits at the geographic and institutional intersection of this story. Its electronic national identity card (CNIE) has been operational since 2008 and progressively upgraded to function as an authentication layer for digital services. That track record of deployment and refinement places Morocco at the crossroads between sub-Saharan innovation and MENA market realities.

Underpinning many of these national efforts is sustained international institutional support. The World Bank’s Identification for Development (ID4D) initiative, launched in 2014, has committed over one billion dollars across more than forty countries, with a significant share directed at African and Middle Eastern states, according to the initiative’s own reporting. The African Development Bank’s Digital Infrastructure for Africa program similarly finances connectivity and digital public goods projects across the continent. Their involvement has helped establish technical standards around biometric formats, cryptographic security and data interoperability that align African national systems with globally recognized practices.

MENA Governments Turn to African GovTech for Digital Infrastructure

The idea that a Nigerian, Rwandan or Ghanaian GovTech provider could supply digital identity infrastructure to a Gulf or Levantine government would have seemed improbable a decade ago. Today it reflects a convergence of practical pressures.

Several MENA governments face variants of the same challenge that drove African countries to build their own systems: large informal or underserved populations, fragmented legacy databases, and the need to integrate social protection, tax administration and financial services into a single identity layer. The engineering requirements often overlap more than the surface differences in income level or institutional context might suggest. African platforms, designed to handle unreliable connectivity, diverse linguistic contexts and high transaction volumes in resource-constrained environments, offer a kind of practical flexibility that generic Western enterprise software rarely provides.

Cost is also a material factor. International software vendors typically price GovTech solutions for governments with large procurement budgets. African providers, whose platforms were frequently co-developed with donor co-funding and priced for emerging-market clients, can present more competitive terms. Smile Identity, the Nigeria-and-Kenya-rooted identity verification company founded in 2017 and now operating across more than thirty African markets, has publicly described its pricing model as designed for high-volume, low-margin environments that global incumbents are not set up to serve efficiently.

Beyond pricing, there is the logic of shared institutional experience. African nations that have navigated the political complexity of population registration, biometric governance and civil registration reform have developed direct operational expertise that Gulf states pursuing rapid e-government transformations can draw on. The African Union’s Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa, adopted in 2020 with a horizon to 2030, explicitly frames digital public infrastructure as an exportable asset and calls for partnerships extending beyond the continent’s borders.

Data Sovereignty and Interoperability: Obstacles to Cross-Regional Scale

The structural opportunity is real. The obstacles are, too. Cross-border deployment of identity systems raises immediate questions about data sovereignty: which jurisdiction retains custody of the biometric data, and under what legal framework can it be shared or accessed? Without a clear bilateral or multilateral legal architecture, governments on both sides face legitimate governance risks that can delay or block partnerships, regardless of their technical merits. This is not a hypothetical concern: several African digital ID rollouts have already faced domestic legal challenges over data storage and access rights, providing cautionary precedent for cross-border arrangements.

Interoperability  presents a second challenge. African national ID systems vary in underlying architecture, data models and security protocols. A platform built for Nigeria’s scale and federal structure does not translate automatically into one suited to a smaller, centrally governed Gulf state. Successful cross-regional deployments require investment in adaptation layers and, typically, sustained technical assistance well beyond the initial contract period.

These obstacles explain why the World Bank’s ID4D initiative and the African Development Bank have been exploring common technical standards and model legal frameworks applicable across Africa and MENA. Sub-regional discussions at the COMESA and ECOWAS levels around mutual recognition of digital credentials offer one potential template for a wider Africa-MENA framework, though translating sub-regional precedents into cross-continental arrangements requires political will alongside technical alignment.

The commercial and institutional momentum behind African GovTech shows no sign of reversing. African identity technology companies have attracted growing venture capital, and governments across the continent have invested steadily in the public-sector infrastructure that underpins private digital services. As these systems mature, the primary barrier to cross-regional deployment will be less about whether the technology performs and more about whether policymakers in Addis Ababa, Cairo, Riyadh and Nairobi can build the legal and diplomatic scaffolding to support it. That is a task for institutions as much as for the engineers and founders who built the platforms themselves.

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From Cairo to Nairobi, Gulf Wealth Fuels Africa’s Urban Boom

30 September 2026 Comments (0) Business

Africa50 infrastructure project site, urban transit corridor in an African city

Cities in need of capital

Africa is urbanizing at a pace few regions have experienced in modern history. The United Nations projects that the continent’s urban population will nearly double by 2050, with hundreds of millions of people moving into cities that already strain under inadequate transport networks, housing shortages and unreliable public services. For municipal authorities in Nairobi, Lagos, Casablanca, Kigali or Dakar, the fiscal arithmetic rarely works: budgets are constrained, creditworthiness is often insufficient to access international bond markets on viable terms, and official development assistance comes with timelines and conditionalities that do not always match project realities.

Into this gap, a new category of investor has been stepping in. Sovereign wealth funds and public development banks, from both Africa and the Gulf, have begun targeting city-scale assets as a strategic priority. The pattern represents a departure from earlier Africa-Gulf capital narratives, which concentrated on energy megaprojects and agribusiness, and more recently on critical minerals. Urban assets, from bus rapid transit corridors to affordable housing and port-adjacent logistics parks, are now actively drawing sovereign capital.

How Gulf and African institutional mandates are converging

On the Gulf side, large sovereign wealth funds face a clear imperative to diversify beyond hydrocarbon-linked returns. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), which manages assets estimated at over 700 billion US dollars, has expanded its international infrastructure portfolio steadily over the past five years. Abu Dhabi’s ADQ and Mubadala have both made commitments to African assets across several sectors, while the Qatar Investment Authority has pursued long-horizon opportunities in emerging markets. Urban infrastructure, with its inflation-linked revenue streams from tolls, fares and lease income, fits well within the mandates of funds designed to think across generations.

On the African side, the institutional architecture for attracting such capital has grown more sophisticated. Africa50, the pan-African infrastructure investment platform backed by African governments and the African Development Bank, has built a portfolio that includes urban transport and toll road projects across multiple countries. It has positioned itself explicitly as a co-investment vehicle capable of working alongside Gulf and other international sovereign partners. Egypt’s Sovereign Fund, Morocco’s development investment institutions and newer public vehicles in Rwanda and Senegal have similarly articulated strategies that welcome foreign co-investors as catalytic partners rather than as lenders of last resort.

The combination works because each side brings different capabilities. African public funds and development banks hold regulatory knowledge, community relationships and political legitimacy that Gulf funds do not possess locally. Gulf sovereign funds bring capital at a scale that African institutions cannot match on their own. Africa50 projects have been structured through blended equity and long-term debt arrangements that distribute risk between public and private investors, with African institutions retaining governance stakes, according to the platform’s own published documentation.

From Cairo to Casablanca: deals taking shape

Several projects illustrate how this co-investment model is materializing. Egypt’s New Administrative Capital, one of the largest urban infrastructure undertakings in Africa or the Middle East in recent years, has drawn on Egyptian state resources alongside Gulf sovereign participation to finance transport networks, digital infrastructure and public buildings across a new city built to relieve pressure on Greater Cairo.

In Morocco, state-backed investment platforms have co-developed urban regeneration and waterfront projects with Gulf partners, drawing on Casablanca’s established position as a financial intermediary between Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. These are not isolated episodes. The African Development Bank, in its infrastructure needs assessments, has estimated the continent’s annual financing gap at between 130 and 170 billion US dollars, a figure that explains why sovereign capital is being actively pursued rather than merely welcomed.

Africa50’s own disclosed portfolio confirms multi-hundred-million-dollar commitments in road and transit projects across several African countries, typically structured so that performance benchmarks are tied to service delivery outcomes. In practical terms, that means financial return for investors is at least partly linked to whether the infrastructure actually functions for its users.

Transparency, land rights and affordability concerns

The shift toward sovereign-fund-led urban financing also introduces governance questions that practitioners and civil society have begun to raise. Unlike multilateral lending, which typically involves established safeguard frameworks and mandatory disclosure requirements, sovereign fund investments are often channeled through private vehicles that carry more limited transparency obligations. Questions about procurement processes, land rights and fare-setting authority have surfaced in several African cities where large infrastructure deals involving foreign capital are under negotiation.

The concerns are substantive. Transit systems that rely on private fare revenue to service debt can generate affordability pressures for low-income residents. Real estate bundled with infrastructure can drive up land values in ways that displace communities adjacent to new corridors. Both the African Development Bank and Africa50 have published social inclusion and environmental frameworks, and both institutions have argued publicly that deals in which African public bodies hold genuine governance stakes, not merely minority financial interests, are better placed to enforce those standards over the life of a project.

The road ahead for African urban co-investment

The trajectory points toward more sovereign-fund involvement in African urban infrastructure, not less. Urbanization pressures are not easing, and the financing gap documented by the African Development Bank will not close through official assistance alone. Gulf sovereign funds, able to deploy meaningful capital into individual city projects while staying within normal risk parameters, represent a structural fit for a structural problem.

What the model still needs is the institutional scaffolding to make deals faster and more accountable to the residents they are meant to serve. Regulatory alignment between African and Gulf financial frameworks, along with clearer public reporting norms for sovereign co-investments, are practical priorities that the African Union and the African Development Bank are working to advance. How quickly that work progresses will determine whether the next generation of African city dwellers benefits from this capital shift, or simply witnesses it from a distance.

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Africa and the Gulf Are Redrawing the Global Tourism Map

28 September 2026 Comments (0) Business, Featured

For most of the past two decades, the Africa-Gulf aviation relationship was largely a story of stopovers. Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi became indispensable hubs for passengers transiting between African cities and European or Asian destinations, with Gulf carriers building formidable networks across the continent. Emirates serves more than 20 African countries; Qatar Airways operates routes to over 30 African destinations. But the character of these flows is changing. Increasingly, African travelers and Gulf visitors make direct bilateral trips for purposes beyond transit: business, leisure, medical care or family visits within diaspora communities.

This shift reflects structural changes on both sides. Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have invested heavily in domestic tourism infrastructure as part of broader economic transformation programs. Saudi Vision 2030 set an explicit target of attracting 150 million visitors annually by 2030, a figure cited by the Saudi Tourism Authority, and African source markets represent a largely untapped opportunity. The UAE has long drawn West and East African business communities to Dubai, and that foundation is now being extended to leisure and hospitality. On the African side, tourism ministers from Kenya to Morocco have recognized that Gulf visitors, who tend to record higher per-capita spending than many other source markets, merit deliberate policy attention.

Visa Reform and Route Openings as Strategic Moves

The clearest expression of this strategic intent is the wave of visa liberalization that has advanced across the continent. Kenya’s decision to abolish visa requirements for all nationalities, implemented in January 2024, is among the most sweeping examples. The Kenyan government framed the move as an explicit economic measure, anticipating higher tourist volumes and increased business travel. Rwanda’s policy of visa-free entry for all African nationals, in place since 2018, has contributed to positioning Kigali as a preferred conference and business travel destination, supported by investment in convention infrastructure and direct international services.

Airline route decisions track closely alongside these policy shifts. Low-cost Gulf carriers, including flydubai and Air Arabia, have extended their African footprints to cities beyond the established hubs of Lagos, Nairobi and Johannesburg. New or expanded services to Accra, Dar es Salaam, Kigali and other secondary cities reduce travel time and cost, broadening the pool of potential travelers in both directions. Ethiopian Airlines, Africa’s largest carrier by revenue and network, has simultaneously reinforced its Gulf services, using Addis Ababa as a competing hub. The result is a route map with more options and greater downward pressure on fares.

Gulf-based hospitality investment reinforces the same momentum. Regional sovereign wealth funds and hotel groups have gradually increased their exposure to African markets, from high-end lodges in East Africa to business hotels in North African capitals. Abu Dhabi’s ADQ holding company has built a portfolio of investments across African infrastructure and services, signaling a pattern that other Gulf vehicles are beginning to follow in the hospitality and real estate segments.

Local Entrepreneurs Navigate Opportunity and Concentration Risk

Behind the policy announcements and airline route maps, a more granular story is developing at the level of individual businesses and communities. African tour operators, hotel managers, restaurateurs and event organizers who serve international visitors are recalibrating their offerings to Gulf traveler habits, including language, dietary requirements and seasonal preferences. In Marrakech, Nairobi and Kigali, hospitality entrepreneurs report a measurable increase in Gulf visitors over the past two years and are adapting accordingly.

For local actors, the opportunity carries tangible economic weight. Tourism is a labor-intensive sector with documented multiplier effects across accommodation, food service, transport and cultural activities. The United Nations World Tourism Organization consistently ranks African tourism as one of the continent’s most accessible paths to foreign exchange earnings and formal employment. According to UNWTO data, Africa welcomed approximately 70 million international arrivals in 2019 before the pandemic disrupted travel; recovery has been uneven since then but generally stronger in markets that have combined visa liberalization with proactive marketing to new source countries.

The risks deserve clear-eyed attention. A high degree of dependence on a narrow set of source markets exposes destinations to volatility: a geopolitical rupture, a currency shift or a health crisis can rapidly suppress arrivals from a single country. African tourism boards and destination management organizations are increasingly aware of this, and many pursue multi-corridor strategies that treat Gulf visitor growth as a complement to intra-African and European demand rather than a replacement. Environmental sustainability and equitable benefit distribution remain live concerns, particularly in ecologically sensitive areas or wherever large hospitality investments bypass local ownership structures.

The Africa-Gulf Corridor at an Inflection Point

The Africa-Gulf tourism corridor is at an early but accelerating stage of development. Policy conditions are improving, aviation infrastructure is widening, and investment flows are beginning to reflect a genuinely bilateral logic rather than a one-way transit relationship. Whether these gains translate into broad-based economic benefit will depend on decisions made at national and local level: how governments reinvest tourism revenues and whether local businesses can position themselves to capture a meaningful share of visitor spending beyond the large hospitality groups. The potential of the corridor is real; its returns remain a matter of deliberate choice.

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Africa–Gulf: The New Payment Corridors Transforming Remittances

21 September 2026 Comments (0) Business

Mobile money transfer app on smartphone, Nairobi, Kenya

For the millions of African workers employed across Gulf Cooperation Council states, the act of sending money home is a routine but costly exercise. According to the World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide database, the average cost of sending 200 dollars from a Gulf country to sub-Saharan Africa has consistently exceeded 7 percent of the transaction value, more than double the 3 percent target set under the UN Sustainable Development Goals. For a domestic worker in Riyadh or a construction technician in Dubai, those fees translate directly into less money reaching a family in Nairobi, Accra, or Lagos.

That cost structure is now under sustained pressure. Over the past several years, a growing cohort of African fintech firms and Gulf-based digital payment platforms have begun constructing interoperable rails that bypass the slow, expensive correspondent banking chains which have long dominated these corridors. The result is a structurally significant reconfiguration of how Africa and the Middle East exchange value, driven not by multilateral mandate but by the commercial logic of founders and regulators on both sides of the corridor.

Mobile money meets Gulf financial modernization

Africa’s mobile money infrastructure is one of the more consequential financial developments of the past two decades. In Kenya, Tanzania, and Ghana, adult population penetration rates for mobile money wallets have surpassed 70 percent in some markets, according to the GSMA’s annual State of the Industry reports. Transaction volumes have grown at double-digit rates year-on-year across multiple markets. This domestic digitalization created an ecosystem capable of receiving international flows cheaply and near-instantly, provided the sending side could connect to it.

The Gulf has, in parallel, been modernizing its own financial infrastructure. Central banks in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Qatar have invested in real-time gross settlement systems and open banking frameworks that lower barriers for fintech entrants. Some Gulf central banks have reported more than 100 percent growth in contactless and instant transfer volumes within single-year periods. The combination of Africa’s mobile-first depth and the Gulf’s regulatory ambition creates the structural conditions for cross-border interoperability.

The operational mechanism is typically an API-based connection linking an African mobile wallet to a Gulf bank account or digital wallet. When an African fintech secures a payment license in a Gulf jurisdiction, it can offer customers the ability to load a wallet in dirhams or riyals and push funds to a mobile money account in Kenyan shillings or Ghanaian cedis within minutes. Several pan-African payment companies have pursued precisely this licensing strategy, seeking regulatory approval in the UAE and Saudi Arabia to serve large African diaspora communities. Gulf-based neobanks, meanwhile, have begun targeting African workers as a core customer segment, given the volume and regularity of their outbound transfers.

Beyond remittances: SME trade and strategic autonomy

The significance of this infrastructure extends well beyond personal remittances. African small and medium enterprises importing goods from Gulf trading hubs, particularly from Dubai’s re-export markets, have historically relied on international wire transfers that can take several days to settle and carry fees that erode already thin margins. Digital payment rails enabling near-instant settlement change the economics of cross-border trade in concrete ways. The African Development Bank has repeatedly emphasized the importance of payment efficiency in enabling intra-regional and South-South commerce, noting persistent gaps that formal banking has been slow to fill.

There is also a geopolitical dimension that analysts are beginning to discuss. Historically, remittance routes between the Gulf and Africa have run through Western correspondent banks or global money transfer operators, which have held considerable pricing power and data visibility over these flows. As African and Gulf actors build their own rails, they gain operational autonomy over fees and routing decisions. This represents a gradual diversification of the financial connective tissue linking the two regions, with African and Gulf actors exercising greater agency than before.

The Islamic Development Bank and the Arab-Africa Trade Bridges program have signaled interest in formalizing such corridors further, linking payment infrastructure to trade finance and development objectives. Regulatory coordination between Gulf and African central banks, while still at an early stage, is beginning to surface as a topic in bilateral and multilateral financial diplomacy.

A corridor still under construction

The buildout of Africa-Gulf digital payment infrastructure remains a work in progress. Regulatory fragmentation across Africa’s 54 jurisdictions means that a license secured in Nigeria does not automatically confer access in Senegal or Ethiopia. Currency volatility in several African markets adds foreign exchange risk that technology alone cannot absorb. Consumer trust in new digital products, particularly among older or less digitally literate migrant workers, requires sustained investment in agent networks and customer education.

None of these obstacles is insurmountable. The trajectory of the sector, measured in licensing milestones and expanding transaction volumes, points clearly toward continued integration. What distinguishes this moment is that the architects of these corridors are not waiting for a global institution to hand them a blueprint. African fintech founders expanding into Gulf markets, Gulf payment operators targeting African diasporas and regulators in both regions adjusting their frameworks are collectively building a financial layer that serves hundreds of millions of people in ways the legacy system never prioritized.

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After Canal+ Takes MultiChoice, African Creators and MENA Platforms Seize Their Moment

7 September 2026 Comments (0) Business, Featured

On 10 July 2026, Canal+ officially completed its takeover of MultiChoice Group, bringing the operator of DStv, GOtv and Showmax under full French ownership after a process that stretched more than two years. The deal valued MultiChoice at roughly 55 billion South African rand, or approximately $3 billion, and came with public interest commitments of nearly R26 billion over three years to cover local content investment and support for historically disadvantaged businesses in the audiovisual sector, according to New African Magazine. Canal+ now holds a dominant pay-TV and streaming position across more than 50 African markets.

Yet the transition is already generating turbulence beneath the corporate headline. MultiChoice had launched Showmax in 2015 as an African-born competitor to Netflix, but the platform accumulated losses of $522 million between 2023 and 2025. Canal+ has signaled it will sunset Showmax as part of a broader plan to cut approximately $479 million in costs across the combined business by 2030, per Techpoint Africa. For Nigerian, South African and Kenyan producers who had relied on Showmax commissions, the practical question is immediate: where do their next financing and distribution deals come from?

The answer arrives from two directions at once: locally built streaming platforms and inbound commercial interest from Middle Eastern operators.

 Bets on Itself with Kava

The most visible homegrown response to the shifting landscape is Kava, a streaming platform launched in August 2025 by two of Nollywood’s most recognized institutions: Inkblot Studios, behind a string of Nigerian box office hits, and Filmhouse Group, West Africa’s largest cinema chain. The platform debuted with more than 30 premium Nollywood titles, offering subscribers exclusive post-theatrical releases and a schedule of weekly additions.

“Kava is more than a streaming service. It’s a bold new chapter for Nollywood, designed to meet the growing demand for premium, authentic African content,” the founders said in a statement reported by TechCabal. The ambition is to do what no African-led platform has yet managed: turn local storytelling into a globally sustainable streaming business.

The underlying numbers support that aspiration. Nigeria’s over-the-top video market is projected to reach $1.22 billion in 2025, according to data cited by TechCabal, while Africa’s broader subscription video-on-demand sector is forecast to grow from $2.71 billion in 2024 to $3.67 billion by 2027, according to Statista. The challenge Kava faces is that the platforms best placed to monetize that growth have historically been non-African: Netflix and Amazon Prime both poured resources into Nigerian content before scaling back acquisition budgets, citing low subscriber penetration. IrokoTV, an earlier attempt at a dedicated Nollywood platform, exited the Nigerian market entirely.

Kava’s founders argue their advantage lies in owning both production infrastructure and distribution, rather than licensing content from studios that retain leverage. Whether that vertical integration proves durable will be one of the sector’s defining tests over the next two years.

MENA Operators Look South for African Content

While African platforms push outward for global audiences, operators from the Middle East are moving in the opposite direction. Media World, a content aggregator and mobile services platform with client telecoms including Zain Iraq and Jawwal Palestine, has recently opened a Lagos office, its first in sub-Saharan Africa. Speaking at the Telemedia Johannesburg 2026 conference, the company’s content acquisition and partnership manager Samer Al Ramahi described the company as being “on the hunt for partnerships to integrate various services like games, esports, and streaming content” from African providers, with the goal of distributing them as white-label products across its MENA footprint, per Telemedia Magazine.

The broader context for that scouting trip is a MENA streaming market that is growing fast and competing fiercely for differentiated content. MBC Group’s Shahid platform reported a 28.2% year-on-year revenue rise in 2025, boosted partly by a first-of-its-kind bundling deal with Netflix in Saudi Arabia and the wider MENA region, according to Variety. As established MENA players scale up, African genres represent both a new content category and an access point to diaspora communities with purchasing power.

Music offers the clearest proof of that audience appetite. Afrobeats listeners grew 22% globally in 2025, according to Spotify’s annual Wrapped report, cited by Techpoint Africa, with Nigerian and South African artists dominating Africa’s most-streamed lists. Gulf touring and licensing activity by African artists has expanded in parallel, building the audience base that streaming and gaming platforms want to monetize.

Africa’s Cross-Regional Content Market Takes Shape

The convergence of these forces, Canal+’s restructuring of Africa’s legacy pay-TV market, the emergence of African-owned streaming platforms and the commercial scouting of MENA aggregators in Lagos and Johannesburg, points to a realignment that is real but still unresolved. The players are in motion; the rules of the new ecosystem are not yet written.

For African creators, the proliferation of potential distribution channels is genuine progress. For investors, the question of which platform model generates sustainable returns remains open. Fragmentation is a risk: multiple smaller platforms competing for overlapping catalog rights and the same subscriber budgets could dilute rather than build value. For MENA operators, Africa offers differentiation and scale, alongside regulatory complexity and the challenge of building content curation expertise far from home.

What is already clear is that Africa’s screen industry is no longer organized around a single dominant gatekeeper. From Kava’s Nollywood catalog to Media World’s Lagos outpost, the architecture of a new cross-regional content economy is being laid. How quickly it coheres, and whose terms it operates on, will shape the careers of African filmmakers, the strategies of Gulf platforms and the viewing habits of audiences from Accra to Riyadh over the coming decade.

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African AI startups tap Gulf cloud and capital to scale regionally

2 September 2026 Comments (0) Business, Featured

Africa’s AI Boom Runs Into a Compute Wall

Africa’s artificial intelligence sector has expanded sharply over the past five years. Startups in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Egypt are applying machine learning to healthcare diagnostics, agricultural yield prediction, credit scoring and logistics optimization, reaching users across multiple African markets from relatively modest bases.

Yet growth has run into a practical ceiling: compute power. Training and deploying AI models demands access to graphics processing units and large-scale cloud infrastructure, which remains expensive, scarce or high-latency across most of the continent. A 2023 report by the International Finance Corporation noted that inadequate digital infrastructure, including unreliable power supply and limited local data center capacity, continues to be a primary constraint on the competitiveness of African technology firms. This is not a peripheral concern. It directly shapes what kinds of AI products are feasible to build, operate and scale locally.

The result is a gap that African founders know well. Their applications are often among the most contextually relevant anywhere, designed around smallholder farmers, informal traders and populations with no formal credit history. But many of the most compute-intensive workloads still run on infrastructure in Europe or North America, adding latency and cost while raising questions about where user data actually resides.

Gulf States Build the Infrastructure Africa Needs

While African AI companies have searched for alternatives, the Gulf has become one of the world’s most active builders of AI-ready infrastructure. The United Arab Emirates launched its National AI Strategy 2031, committing to becoming a global hub for AI talent, research and deployment. Abu Dhabi-based G42, one of the most prominent AI holding companies in the Global South, has secured major partnerships with Microsoft and OpenAI, while positioning itself as a bridge between Gulf capital and emerging-market applications. Saudi Arabia established its Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority, known as SDAIA, in 2019 as a cornerstone of Vision 2030, and the kingdom now hosts cloud regions from major hyperscalers including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

The scale of these investments is substantial. Both the UAE and Saudi Arabia have committed or attracted tens of billions of dollars to AI and cloud infrastructure over the past three years, according to official government communications from their respective AI and investment authorities. Critically, neither government frames this purely as a domestic modernization project. Official strategies explicitly reference the broader Global South as a partner market, an acknowledgment that Gulf AI ambitions require use cases, data sets and talent ecosystems that extend well beyond their own relatively small domestic populations.

For African startups, this creates a genuine opening. Gulf cloud regions offer lower latency than European equivalents for workloads routed through East or North Africa. Gulf-based venture vehicles and sovereign funds are actively seeking exposure to high-growth but still under-served markets. And Gulf governments are establishing accelerator programs and co-investment frameworks that bring African founders into direct contact with regional infrastructure partners. The Africa-Gulf digital corridor, still in its early stages, is beginning to function as a practical alternative to the transatlantic infrastructure dependency that has defined African tech since the sector emerged.

Data Sovereignty and Investment Terms in the Africa-Gulf Corridor

The emergence of this corridor raises issues that African founders, regulators and civil society actors are only beginning to address. Data sovereignty is the most immediate. When an African healthtech company stores patient records in a data center in Abu Dhabi or Riyadh, it enters a different legal jurisdiction, one whose data protection frameworks may not align with the legislation being developed in Nigeria, Kenya or South Africa. Several African countries have passed or are drafting data protection laws inspired by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, but cross-border enforcement mechanisms remain underdeveloped.

Equity in investment terms is another layer of complexity. Gulf capital is often patient and comes with strategic rather than purely financial objectives, which can suit African startups that struggle with the short exit timelines demanded by some venture funds. But it also introduces governance considerations around board composition, founder dilution and exit conditions that require careful negotiation. African startup associations have begun calling for standardized term sheets and greater investor education to ensure that cross-regional capital flows on balanced terms.

On the Gulf side, fund managers are learning to assess African market risks, regulatory complexity and currency dynamics. Knowledge that transfers readily within the Middle East does not always apply in Lagos, Nairobi or Accra. Several Gulf-based accelerators have responded by embedding Africa-focused programs and partnering with established African tech hubs to build this expertise from the ground up.

The underlying logic of the corridor is coherent: African markets supply use cases, talent and demographic reach, while Gulf partners bring infrastructure, institutional capital and access to global technology alliances. Translating that logic into durable, equitable commercial arrangements is the practical work now underway. How well African and Gulf actors manage it will shape not only the competitiveness of individual companies, but the terms on which both regions contribute to the global AI economy in the years ahead.

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Gulf sovereign funds move into African critical minerals

31 August 2026 Comments (0) Business

Open-pit copper mine in Zambia's Copperbelt region, southern Africa

In January 2023, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and national mining company Ma’aden launched Manara Minerals, a joint venture designed to acquire stakes in mining assets worldwide. Africa was named a priority region from the outset, reflecting the continent’s commanding position in several minerals considered critical for the energy transition. The Democratic Republic of Congo alone accounts for roughly 70 percent of global cobalt production, according to US Geological Survey data, while the DRC and Zambia together form one of the world’s largest copper belts. Zimbabwe, Namibia and Guinea hold significant lithium, rare earth and bauxite reserves respectively.

Manara’s creation was not an isolated signal. Emirati sovereign wealth funds, including Mubadala Investment Company and ADQ, have also earmarked capital for African resource sectors over the past several years. The logic is direct: as electric vehicle sales and renewable energy storage scale up globally, demand for cobalt, lithium, nickel and copper is projected to multiply significantly over the coming decade, according to the International Energy Agency’s Critical Minerals Market Review. Gulf states, which built sovereign wealth funds on hydrocarbon revenues, are positioning themselves as indispensable nodes in the new energy supply chain even as oil’s relative centrality shifts.

The scale of the opportunity on the African side is substantial. Africa is estimated to hold around 30 percent of global mineral reserves relevant to battery production when cobalt, manganese and other inputs are combined, per African Development Bank analysis. Gulf capital entering this space therefore meets a continent whose resource endowment is increasingly acknowledged as a strategic geopolitical asset, not merely a raw commodity source.

African governments push back: from extraction to processing

African policymakers have made clear they do not intend to repeat earlier extractive patterns. Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo signed a memorandum in 2023 to collaborate on building an electric vehicle battery value chain, targeting local production of precursor chemicals and battery cells. Under this framework, both countries sought investors willing to fund smelting, refining and manufacturing capacity inside their borders, rather than simply shipping unprocessed ore concentrate abroad.

This posture reflects a wider continental debate about beneficiation. The African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the African Continental Free Trade Area both explicitly support industrialization goals that tie resource extraction to downstream manufacturing. Several African governments have moved from rhetoric to concrete policy instruments: export restrictions on raw ores, licensing conditions and fiscal incentives have been deployed to steer investment toward processing facilities. For Gulf investors, this means that securing access to African minerals now requires negotiating over where value is created, not just who extracts it.

How Gulf entities respond to this insistence will shape the quality of Africa-Gulf mineral partnerships. Some have expressed willingness to co-fund refining infrastructure, which would align with African industrial ambitions. Others have focused primarily on equity stakes in upstream operations. African mining ministers and trade negotiators have made it clear that partnerships offering only extraction rights will encounter tougher political conditions than those bringing processing investment and technology transfer.

A competitive field, with African actors asserting leverage

Gulf investment in African minerals does not unfold in isolation. Chinese firms and state entities have built deep relationships across African mining sectors over the past two decades, funding infrastructure and acquiring concessions from the DRC to Guinea. Western governments have also stepped up engagement: the US Minerals Security Partnership and the European Union’s Critical Raw Materials Act both seek to diversify supply chains away from dominant single sources, with Africa as a key partner.

African leaders have shown increasing willingness to use this competitive environment as leverage. The 2023 BRICS expansion, which brought Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and the UAE into the bloc at the Johannesburg summit, created a shared forum where African and Middle Eastern states can align on global economic governance questions, including trade rules for critical minerals. The practical ability to play different investors against each other is still developing, but the intention is clearly articulated by a growing number of African finance and mining officials.

For Gulf states, building durable partnerships in African mining requires more than capital deployment. It requires long-term presence, technical co-investment and a political relationship that survives government changes and commodity price cycles. Saudi Arabia’s PIF and the Manara vehicle face this test as they move from initial deal exploration to actual project development. The quality of these early partnerships will shape how African governments and publics perceive Gulf actors in the sector for years to come.

The trajectory of Africa-Gulf critical minerals cooperation is ultimately an industrial policy story more than a finance story. Whether African cobalt, lithium and copper end up processed locally or exported raw, whether Gulf capital helps build battery factories in Lusaka or Kinshasa or simply adds another layer of foreign ownership to existing mines: these choices will determine how much of the energy transition’s economic value is captured on the continent. As Manara Minerals and comparable vehicles move from exploration to execution over the next few years, they will provide the clearest test yet of whether Gulf-Africa mineral partnerships can deliver on the industrial ambitions both sides have publicly articulated.

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African Agritech Startups Reshape How the Gulf Secures Its Food Supply

12 August 2026 Comments (0) Business, Featured

Kenyan smallholder farmer using mobile agritech platform in field

A Strategic Rethink of Food Import Dependency

Gulf states import between 80 and 90 percent of their food, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, making them acutely sensitive to disruptions in global supply chains. The pressures of recent years, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the war in Ukraine and its cascading effects on grain exports, have pushed food security to the top of policy agendas in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Doha. Traditional responses centered on securing land abroad or locking in long-term commodity contracts with established agricultural exporters. That approach is now giving way to technology-driven partnerships with African agritech companies.

Sovereign investors and state food security agencies across the Gulf Cooperation Council are increasingly directing attention toward African agritech, where startups are building digital infrastructure for farm finance and supply-chain traceability. The African Development Bank estimates that the financing gap for smallholder farmers across Africa exceeds 100 billion dollars annually, a structural deficit that digital platforms are beginning to address by connecting producers to credit and direct market access. For Gulf importers seeking resilient supply chains, these platforms offer not just commodity access but embedded relationships with agricultural ecosystems that are still expanding.

How African Founders Are Positioning Their Companies

The agritech sector across sub-Saharan and North Africa has expanded substantially over the past decade. Startups operating in Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco and Ghana have built platforms that aggregate smallholder supply, deliver mobile-based advisory services, and link farmers directly to export buyers through digitized logistics. African Development Bank data on agricultural finance indicates that digital tools measurably improve access to credit and reduce post-harvest losses in the markets where they have scaled. These are precisely the metrics that attract Gulf food security planners looking for supply partners capable of guaranteeing volume and provenance.

What is changing now is the nature of the capital entering the sector. Gulf sovereign wealth funds have historically invested in African infrastructure, real estate and energy. Their move toward agritech represents a more nuanced calculation: rather than owning farmland outright, they are backing the digital layers that sit above it, funding platforms that improve productivity and logistics without requiring direct land management. For African founders, this shift carries measurable commercial consequences. Access to Gulf distribution networks and government procurement contracts can transform a regional platform into a continental export hub.

Morocco offers a useful illustration of how this dynamic plays out in practice. Its position as a net agricultural exporter with a developed agro-processing sector, anchored by the government’s long-running Green Morocco Plan, has made it an early point of engagement for Gulf food investors. Moroccan producer networks supplying citrus, tomatoes and olives to Gulf markets have progressively adopted traceability and quality management systems, partly in response to import standards set by Gulf state food agencies. The digital infrastructure underlying that compliance was largely built by domestic and pan-African technology firms, not external contractors.

Capital and Governance: Data Sovereignty in Africa-Gulf Agritech Partnerships

The economic logic of these partnerships is clear enough. Less obvious, but equally significant, are the governance questions they carry. When a Gulf sovereign fund takes a stake in an African agritech platform, it acquires both a financial interest and a degree of influence over how that platform develops its services, sets pricing and manages farmer data. African founders and cooperative leaders are increasingly aware of this dimension. Some are structuring deals with explicit protections for local decision-making and data sovereignty, framing those clauses not as obstacles to investment but as conditions for long-term sustainability.

The African Continental Free Trade Area, which entered its operational phase in 2021, adds another layer of opportunity to this equation. As intra-African trade in agricultural goods deepens, the agritech platforms being built today may serve as the connective tissue of a new regional food system, one that links producers in East Africa to processors in West Africa and export hubs in North Africa before reaching Gulf markets. Gulf investment that funds this infrastructure now could gain privileged access to supply chains considerably larger in scale within a decade.

For smallholder cooperatives, the value of these partnerships ultimately depends on terms. Price transparency and data access rights are as consequential as the headline investment figure. Several African agritech companies have publicly emphasized co-ownership models and revenue-sharing structures as a way to distinguish their approach from platforms that capture data without redistributing value. Whether Gulf investors accept those terms at scale will be a defining question for the sector over the next few years.

The trajectory of African agritech and Gulf food security is, in the end, a story about two sets of actors each managing structural vulnerabilities through technology and negotiated partnership. African founders and their farmer networks are building systems designed to outlast any single investor relationship. Gulf food security agencies are seeking supply-chain resilience that no single commodity contract can provide. Where those interests align with equitable terms, the partnerships forming now may prove among the most durable economic ties linking the two regions.

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Gulf Capital Reshapes Africa’s Alliances

7 August 2026 Comments (0) Business, Featured

Africa’s Debt Mountain and the Gulf’s Growing Role

Over the past decade, African sovereign debt expanded significantly. Public debt ratios climbed above 60 percent of GDP in a number of sub-Saharan countries by the early 2020s, according to IMF Regional Economic Outlook data, driven by infrastructure borrowing, pandemic response spending, and the rising cost of refinancing older loans. Several countries found themselves in debt distress or at high risk of it.

Ghana suspended external debt payments in late 2022 and entered formal restructuring; Zambia had defaulted in 2020, the first African country to do so during the pandemic; Ethiopia followed in 2023. Each case triggered negotiations under the G20’s Common Framework, a mechanism designed to coordinate debt treatment across official bilateral creditors, including Chinese policy banks and Gulf development funds, alongside multilateral lenders such as the IMF and World Bank.

What distinguishes the current cycle from earlier African debt crises is the breadth of the creditor base. Traditional Paris Club lenders now sit alongside Gulf development funds and private bondholders at the same negotiating tables. This fragmentation has slowed restructuring timelines considerably. The Zambian process took several years to reach a preliminary creditor agreement, partly because aligning Chinese and Western creditors on comparable terms proved far more complex than previous rounds of Club negotiations.

Gulf States as Creditors and Strategic Investors in Africa

Gulf involvement in African sovereign finance takes multiple forms. The Saudi Fund for Development and the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development have extended bilateral loans to African governments for infrastructure projects, energy installations, and budget support. These loans, while often concessional, do not always fall under the Common Framework’s umbrella, creating ambiguity about how they factor into restructuring scenarios. More recently, Gulf sovereign wealth funds, including the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, have moved into equity-style investments, acquiring stakes in African ports, energy projects, and agribusiness assets.

This dual role, as both creditor and investor, gives Gulf states a distinctive position in African debt diplomacy. When an African government seeks a debt standstill or reduced repayment schedule, it must negotiate not only with private bond committees and the IMF but also with bilateral partners whose cooperation can unlock or block a deal. Gulf states, meanwhile, have an interest in maintaining access to African markets and strategic infrastructure, which means they often prefer restructuring over default. The result is a calculus in which debt relief and new investment become intertwined: a restructuring agreement may arrive packaged with a fresh infrastructure commitment or a port concession, effectively converting debt exposure into long-term physical presence.

This pattern was documented across several African countries by 2024, as reported by The Africa Report and Reuters Africa. For African governments, such arrangements can mobilize capital that domestic budgets are unable to provide. The trade-offs involve questions of transparency, governance quality, and the long-term terms under which strategic assets are managed.

African Negotiators Building Leverage in Debt Talks

A common misconception frames these negotiations as inherently one-sided. Research by economists at the African Development Bank and the Overseas Development Institute points to a more layered reality. African finance ministries have built substantial technical capacity over the past decade, supported by IMF technical assistance and regional peer learning. Countries like Ghana and Zambia entered restructuring with clearly stated fiscal targets, domestic debt exchange programs, and structured public communications designed to manage market expectations while maintaining political legitimacy at home.

The growth of local-currency bond markets adds another dimension of leverage. Several African countries have deepened domestic debt markets, issuing bonds purchased largely by domestic banks and pension funds. This reduces, though does not eliminate, exposure to external creditor pressure. The African Development Bank’s 2023 African Economic Outlook noted that domestic resource mobilization was gaining traction in markets from Kenya to Côte d’Ivoire, as governments sought to diversify away from expensive Eurobond issuances subject to global rate volatility.

At the multilateral level, African governments have increasingly coordinated positions through the African Union and regional economic communities. Calls for accelerated Common Framework timelines and clearer rules on comparability of treatment across creditor classes have come directly from African finance ministers, who have pointed to the economic cost of prolonged restructuring uncertainty. This assertiveness signals a broader shift: a move from reactive accommodation toward deliberate positioning in global financial governance debates.

Development Stakes and the Long-Term Regional Balance

The resolution, or prolonged absence of resolution, of Africa’s sovereign debt challenges has direct consequences for the continent’s development capacity. With more than 60 percent of Africa’s population under the age of 25, according to African Union data, the need for public investment in education, health, and transport infrastructure is pressing. The IMF has documented cases in which African countries spend more on external debt servicing than on health budgets, a fiscal reality that limits governments’ ability to act as engines of social investment and long-term growth.

For Gulf states, the stakes run differently. Their African debt and investment portfolios are embedded in broader strategic visions: Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 and the UAE’s economic diversification roadmap both treat African markets as significant long-term frontiers for capital. Maintaining a reputation as credible, transparent partners is not merely a reputational consideration; it is a precondition for the commercial access and political relationships those visions require.

The architecture of African debt diplomacy now taking shape, in which Gulf capital, Chinese lending, multilateral conditionality, and African negotiating capacity all interact, will likely influence the continent’s development trajectory well into the 2030s. For investors, policymakers, and citizens across both regions, understanding who holds leverage, how it is exercised, and how African leaders navigate the resulting constraints is a practical question. It shapes what infrastructure gets financed, what fiscal space governments retain, and how resilient economies prove when the next global shock arrives.

Photo : modeldiplomat.com

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