Africa’s first credit rating agency set to launch

The launch is part of a wider push by developing countries, at the G20 and the UN, to change how global finance prices their risk. South Africa used its 2025 G20 presidency to put borrowing costs on the agenda.

In an op-ed published in Africa Renewal, the UN magazine, Rose-Quatre and Ahunna Eziakonwa, the UN secretary-general’s special adviser on Africa, said unfair ratings cost Africa $74.5 billion a year — an estimate which was first published by the UN Development Programme in 2023.

Key details of the new agency remain unclear. The APRM describes it as privately owned and self-funded but has not named its shareholders, chief executive, or board. Mauritius Commercial Bank and the pan-African lender Afreximbank took part in a 2025 meeting to raise support for the project. According to the APRM note, AfCRA “will require a licence” from Mauritius’ financial regulator.

People close to the project say trust will take time. “Credibility in credit rating is accumulated rather than declared,” said Daniel Cash, a UK-based law professor who has advised the APRM on credit ratings. The real test, he told Semafor, will come when AfCRA issues a rating that a member state, “particularly an influential one” strongly dislikes. “Independence is demonstrated at the point of disagreement.”

The launch also comes as global agencies expand on the continent. Moody’s owns GCR, the largest issuer of ratings in Africa, and in July S&P agreed to buy a majority stake in Nigeria’s Agusto & Co. S&P Global declined to comment, while Moody’s and Fitch did not respond to requests for comment.

For half a century, the cost of African borrowing has been set largely in New York by three firms that rate the 55 countries from a distance. AfCRA is the continent finally taking a seat at the table where its risk is priced.

Every 10 basis points shaved off a $1 billion Eurobond saves an issuer $1 million a year. Twenty-three states have no rating from the big agencies at all, which locks them out of mandates that require one. That’s the prize.

True, AfCRA has no track record and no named shareholders, but the quickest route to credibility runs through pain: an early, well-argued downgrade of one of the governments that cheered the launch.

Critics question whether investors will trust any agency created by the governments it rates. David Lubin of UK think tank Chatham House asked whether AfCRA amounts to Africa “marking its own homework,” adding that fund managers compare African borrowers with the rest of the world and an African agency “does nothing” for them.

Misheck Mutize, AfCRA’s chief architect, acknowledged that the agency’s main role would be to steer Africa’s $4 trillion savings into African assets rather than changing how foreign investors see the continent.

“The challenge here is that this is the bare minimum disclosure required before international investors can even begin to take AfCRA seriously,” said Bright Simons, head of research at IMANI, a think tank based in Accra, writing on public policy platform Katanomics Society.