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HRI Roadmap for Africa: Mobilizing Finance for Africa’s Frontier Markets
Africa, with 17% of the world's population and widely recognized for its competitive investment returns, represents one of the most significant untapped opportunities in global markets. FDI to the continent rose to $97 billion in 2024, around 6% of global flows, signalling growing investor confidence. Beyond these headline figures lies a vast frontier of underserved communities, purpose-driven businesses and entire local economies ready to scale up with the right support. The Humanitarian and Resilience Investing (HRI) Roadmap for Africa, developed by the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the World Economic Forum, aims to address this challenge by presenting a framework to foster partnerships between civil society, humanitarian and development organizations, governments and private sector companies to mobilize investment in Africa’s frontier markets. The roadmap will contribute to the HRI initiative's ambition, announced through a global call to action in 2023, to mobilize $10 billion of commercial and catalytic capital to enable 1,000 businesses to scale up in frontier markets by 2030. By 2027, AfDB and the HRI initiative aim to launch up to five country alliances, with the goal to iterate, refine and expand the approach in 10 markets by 2030.
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Corporate and finance leaders are transforming their operations because it makes good business sense to do so. In 2024, the green economy accounted for ~$8 trillion in listed equity market value and has outperformed global equities by ~59% since 2008. Yet the private sector still invests ~$5 trillion annually in activities that harm nature, despite research showing more than half global GDP depends on the services nature provides.
The 50+ investible opportunities presented in this report can help swing the pendulum. Spanning 13 critical sectors selected for their impacts and dependencies on nature, they deliver economic returns as well as climate mitigation, job creation and resilience-building. As they scale up, these opportunities have the potential to move from isolated interventions to industry-shaping transitions.
New analysis in this report builds on several years of collaboration between the World Economic Forum and Oliver Wyman on the Nature Positive Transitions series. The main report is accompanied by two additional documents:
– CEO Primer: Overview of high-level findings and the 50+ investible opportunities, tailored for senior executives across corporate sectors and financial institutions.
– Supplementary Appendix: Detailed, sector-by-sector analysis of each opportunity, including financial instruments, impacts on nature and business cases.















