President William Ruto has called for changes to Africa’s financial rules to allow more local savings to finance infrastructure and other development projects on the continent.
Speaking at the “Africa We Build” high-level roundtable in New York on September 21, 2026, Ruto said Africa’s challenge was no longer a shortage of capital, but the rules determining where the money can be invested. “Africa’s problem is no longer the amount of capital available to it. Africa’s problem is the set of rules that decide where that capital is allowed to go,” he said. He said African non-bank domestic capital pools have surpassed $2 trillion, while pension and insurance assets have crossed $1 trillion for the first time. Ruto contrasted this with the $1.7 trillion in external concessional and commercial capital that flowed into Africa between 2014 and 2024. The President cited Kenya’s pension sector as an example, saying the industry holds about Sh3.2 trillion, with 46 percent invested in government securities, while only 0.02 percent is held in infrastructure debt. "I will bring this down to one person. A teacher in Eldoret has paid into a pension fund for twenty years. Her savings are real, her fund is competently managed, and her contributions have never missed a month. Her money is more likely to sit in a Treasury bill in this city than in the geothermal plant an hour up the road from her classroom," he said. "I can tell you exactly where her money is, because we publish it. Kenya’s pension industry holds about 3.2 trillion Kenyan shillings (approximately 24.7 billion US Dollars)." He said African regulators, insurers, rating agencies and financial institutions should work together to make local infrastructure investments more attractive to domestic investors. On risks, he also called for African risk to be assessed using actual default and recovery data, more affordable insurance for productive assets and financial rules that do not discourage long-term investments. Additionally, Ruto said Kenya was ready to provide its own data and work with international financial institutions and regulators to test whether existing risk-rating methodologies accurately reflect African realities. The Head of State said the continent must urgently expand its infrastructure and industrial base to meet future demand. “By 2050 this continent must build the power systems, the transport networks and the industries that will employ a population approaching 2.5 billion people. We will not get there one exceptional transaction at a time,” he said. He urged the financial sector to make investment in productive African assets routine rather than treating each major project as an exceptional transaction.