View / The ‘single story’ of African credit ratings

Africa’s long-running argument with the world’s credit rating agencies is becoming harder to ignore.

Rising geopolitical fragmentation and shrinking development budgets mean African governments are increasingly reliant on market borrowing — and therefore on the judgments of New York firms Fitch, Moody’s and S&P. Their verdicts shape borrowing costs and, in some cases, whether countries can raise capital for education, health, and infrastructure.

This is why 2026 has kicked off with a renewed push — led by the UNDP, the African Union, and a network of local credit rating agencies — to correct what many African policymakers see as a persistent mispricing of African risk.

Local and regional African credit rating agencies argue that their global counterparts overweight hard currency constraints and external shocks while underestimating domestic resilience and informal economic activity. The result, they say, is a pattern of swift downgrades during crises but slow upgrades during recovery. These African agencies place greater emphasis on local-currency creditworthiness, subnational finances, and structural reforms to fill those blind spots.

But even for regional agencies, data gaps remain acute, forcing reliance on third-party proxies that flatten economic complexity. This fuels the risk of a “single story,” said Aloysius Uche Ordu, a senior fellow at Washington think tank Brookings Institution, channeling the words of author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. “We have to tell our own story,” said Ordu.

African rating agencies are unlikely to replace global ones anytime soon, nor do they need to. Instead, the continent needs both: stronger local-currency ratings, better data, deeper capital markets, and structured engagement between African and global rating agencies.

In a world where cheap money is all but gone, correcting how African risk is understood — and priced — is no longer a theoretical debate. It is a financing imperative.