Nairobi, Aug. 5 -- Africa's investment story is usually told as one of scarcity. The more interesting truth is misallocation. The African Development Bank's African Economic Outlook 2024 puts the continent's annual development financing gap at more than $400 billion, yet African institutional investors hold trillions of dollars in assets, much of it in low yield instruments.

Meanwhile the continent attracts only a sliver of global institutional capital. The problem is not that money is absent, but that the pipes to move it, the institutions to structure it and the markets to absorb it remain underbuilt.

That reframing changes the prescription. For decades, the reflexive answer has been aided, concessional lending or charitable capital....