Today at the Africa Investment Forum, FSD Africa and the African Development Bank launched the Long-Term Finance Scoreboard, a first-of-its-kind tool designed to provide investors, policy-makers and donors with a centralised, comprehensive source of market-intelligence on the continent’s long-term finance markets.

At FSD Africa we believe that long-term finance – capital provided for over one year – is vital to driving Africa’s economic growth and development. Africa currently faces significant long-term finance gaps and we estimate that the funding gap for SMEs, infrastructure, housing and agri-business is over US $300bn per year.

The scoreboard, developed by the Africa Long-Term Finance Initiative, centralises continent-wide data on the strength of Africa’s capital markets for the first time. By bringing together a range of previously disparate sources of data, on one accessible and easy to use platform, it aims to close historic information gaps and provide investors, policy-makers and donors with the ights required to develop and deepen domestic long-term finance markets.