Home Capital Raising & Corporate Finance The Great African Treasury Shift
Author: Charles Wachira | Photos: Shutterstock
Currency reforms, liquidity pressures, and new payment rails are forcing African CFOs to rethink corporate strategy.
This article appears in the September 2026 issue of Global Finance Magazine.
When Nigeria liberalized the naira in June 2023 , something of a chain reaction began across Africa. Egypt sharply devalued the pound in March 2024 under a reform program supported by the International Monetary Fund, and Ethiopia dismantled decades of foreign-exchange controls four months later. Headlines focused on inflation, exchange-rate volatility, and political fallout.
Inside multinational boardrooms, however, another conversation was quietly taking shape.
Where should liquidity be held? CFOs and corporate treasurers asked. Can capital still be repatriated efficiently? Is local-currency borrowing now preferable to offshore funding? And should Africa continue to be managed as dozens of fragmented financial markets, or, increasingly, as one integrated treasury landscape?
The answers are reshaping one of the least visible—but most strategically important—functions within multinational companies.
“Treasury efficiency has shifted from a secondary consideration to a first-order determinant: often the binding constraint, even when infrastructure and trade fundamentals appear sound,” said Phumlani Majozi, executive director of the African Markets Institute (AMI). “The logic is straightforward; multinationals prefer an environment where it’s easy to extract their capital when they need it.”
His observation reflects a profound shift in corporate thinking.
For decades, multinational companies evaluated Africa through a familiar lens: market size, consumer demand, infrastructure, labor costs, and political stability. More often nowadays, the decisive consideration is whether capital itself can move efficiently across the continent.
Lending to Africa by China’s two principal policy banks has fallen dramatically, from US$28.8 billion in 2016 to US$2.1 billion in 2024, according to the Boston University Global Development Policy Center . As governments rely more on commercial finance and private capital to fund development, multinational companies have assumed greater responsibility for financing projects and managing liquidity across multiple jurisdictions.
The African Development Bank estimates that the continent requires some US$170 billion annually to finance infrastructure, but currently attracts only US$80 billion to US$90 billion, leaving a financing gap approaching US$80 billion each year. Against that backdrop, treasury has moved from supporting investment decisions to influencing them.
“The biggest change is that the treasurer is now expected to do far more than manage cash, funding, banking, and risk,” said Mike Richards, founder and CEO of The Treasury Recruitment Company. “Those things remain essential, but today’s treasurer is expected to help the CFO and the board understand what is happening, what the risks are, and what decisions need to be made.”
That evolution is especially evident across Africa.
Unlike Europe or North America, treasury teams operating on the continent must simultaneously navigate 54 sovereign jurisdictions, more than 40 actively used currencies, multiple exchange-rate regimes, and a complex web of banking regulations and capital controls. A finance executive overseeing operations stret…