Private credit is on a rapid rise in Africa. Loans made by investment funds and other non-bank investors rather than traditional banks grew more than threefold in five years to $5.6 billion at the end of 2025, according to a new Moody’s report. But that represents just 0.3% of the $1.8 trillion global private credit market.
The bigger opportunity may be in pooling African loans, say the report’s authors. Development-finance institutions can take on some of the risk in the loans, making the safer portion attractive to pension funds, insurers and other large global investors that might otherwise stay away. Moody’s expects these structures to attract much larger pools of private capital into Africa.
That could make private credit an important source of long-term financing for infrastructure and businesses that banks cannot or will not fund. African banks are constrained by government borrowing and shallow domestic savings, while the continent faces an infrastructure financing gap estimated at up to $100 billion a year.
