In February 2024, British International Investment made a quiet transaction that its own communications team described as the first of its kind. BII sold stakes in three emerging-market funds — including two Africa-focused vehicles, Novastar Ventures Africa Fund II and Adenia Capital Fund IV — to Blue Earth Capital, a Zurich-based impact-focused secondaries specialist. No deal size was disclosed. BII retained stakes in all three funds and kept its seats on the LPACs. The transaction was described, in BII’s own words, as “a pilot to support the development of a more robust secondaries private equity market” in emerging markets.
That framing — a pilot, designed to develop a market — tells you most of what you need to know about where Africa’s secondary market infrastructure stands in 2026. After a decade of primary capital deployment and an exit crisis that AVCA estimates covers more than $10 billion in unrealised portfolio value, the tools that managers in New York and London use routinely to manage fund lifecycle are being assembled in Africa for the first time.
The Liquidity Gap in Numbers
AVCA’s 2024 African Private Capital Activity Report recorded 63 exits across the continent — a 47 percent year-on-year increase and the highest volume since 2022. Secondary sales made up 32 percent of those exits, modestly above the five-year average of 29 percent. Both numbers sound reasonably healthy until set against the denominator.
Africa-focused fund managers hold $10.3 billion in dry powder — capital raised but not yet deployed — at the same time as holding a backlog of ageing unrealised assets. The exit-to-investment ratio for African private equity sits at 0.13x, against a global norm closer to 0.3x to 0.5x. Put differently: for every dollar invested by African PE managers, thirteen cents has been returned to LPs. The comparable figure for global private equity is three to five times that. The secondary market is the mechanism through which that gap needs to close, and it is working — but slowly, and at insufficient scale.
Africa’s contribution to the global secondary market in 2023 was effectively a rounding error. Jefferies’ annual secondary market review found that Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe combined accounted for roughly three percent of a $132 billion global secondary volume in 2023 — a year in which Ardian was raising a $30 billion secondaries fund and Lexington Partners had just closed a $23 billion vehicle. The scale mismatch is structural: the major global secondaries specialists require minimum transaction sizes of at least $100 million to deploy efficiently. African fund portfolios rarely generate individual secondary transactions at that threshold.
What Is Actually Happening: The DFI Secondary Layer
In the absence of global specialist buyers, Africa’s secondary market is being driven primarily by DFIs acting as both sellers and buyers — and by a small number of Africa-focused specialists moving into the gap.
BII’s Blue Earth Capital transaction was the most visible DFI-led secondary. BII’s motive was explicit: recycle capital toward new commitments while creating a precedent that other DFIs can follow. The “pilot” framing was not false modesty — it was an acknowledgement that the transaction’s purpose was as much market-development as portfolio management. If subsequent DFI LPs follow with comparable structures, the secondary market acquires price discovery and transaction history. Without that history, buyers price in maximum uncertainty, which means maximum discount.
In July 2024, Sango Capital — a South Africa-based manager with more than $670 million under management and Africa’s most active dedicated secondary buyer — acquired a majority of LP interests in Synergy Private Equity Fund I, a 2014-vintage fund with assets in Nigeria and Ghana. Sango described the deal as “the first transaction of its kind in Africa” for tail-end fund solutions. The characterisation is accurate in a narrow sense: acquiring a majority of LP interests in an end-of-life Africa PE fund as a structured liquidity solution had not been done in that form before. The deal was small by global standards. It was a proof of concept that the structure can work.
A third category of secondary transaction — portfolio-company-level stake sales — has also been active. BII sold its 10.1 percent stake in I&M Bank to AfricInvest in June 2024, an eight-year hold monetised through a direct stake sale rather than a fund-level secondary. This route is available for marquee assets with credible institutional buyers — it is not a scalable mechanism for the mid-market backlog.
The GP-Led Gap
In global private equity, the dominant secondary liquidity tool in 2025 was not the LP sale. It was the GP-led continuation vehicle — a structure in which a fund manager moves a portfolio company into a new, purpose-built fund, offering existing LPs the choice to take cash now or roll into the continuation vehicle. GP-led transactions accounted for $115 billion of global secondary volume in 2025, or 89 percent of all GP-led activity tracked by Jefferies. The structure has become the standard toolkit for any manager who needs to extend a holding period beyond the original fund life without forcing a distressed sale.
Africa has zero publicly disclosed GP-led continuation vehicles. Not one. JEPA Africa’s analysis of East African private equity found no precedent for the structure having been deployed in the region, describing it as “an entirely untapped opportunity.” The Helios, AfricInvest, Actis, and DPI funds that are navigating extension periods and LP pressure have not used the tool that their counterparts in the US and Europe have made standard.
The reasons are structural. A continuation vehicle requires a buyer willing to provide liquidity to exiting LPs at a credible NAV — and that buyer needs either to be a global secondaries specialist comfortable with African asset pricing, a DFI with an emerging-market mandate, or an Africa-dedicated secondary fund. The first category is not deploying at scale in Africa. The second is available but limited. The third barely existed before 2024. Without buyers, there is no mechanism for the GP to offer LPs a genuine exit choice. Without the choice, the continuation vehicle cannot be formed. The manager is left with extensions, recapitalisations, or forced sales.
Infrastructure Being Built
The market infrastructure that makes secondaries possible — price transparency, standard documentation, buyer capacity — is being assembled, slowly and mostly in South Africa.
In September 2024, MeTTa Capital launched what it describes as South Africa’s first dedicated PE secondaries fund, targeting investors in Section 12J and Section 12B structures seeking early liquidity. The fund made its first investment in Kalon Venture Partners Fund I, a tech-focused Section 12J vehicle with holdings including payments infrastructure company Ozow. The minimum investment is R500,000 — a structure designed for the South African high-net-worth and family office market, not for institutional DFI secondaries. It is a beginning, not a clearing mechanism.
In November 2025, Stears and Ventures Platform launched the Stears-VP Liquidity Index — the first standardised liquidity benchmark for African private markets, built on a decade of exit data submitted confidentially by leading GPs. The index rose from 113.27 at end-2024 to 130.28 by Q3 2025. The significance is not the number itself but what the number represents: the first time Africa private market participants have had a common reference point for pricing expectations. Without a price reference, secondary negotiations begin from maximum information asymmetry. The index does not eliminate that asymmetry, but it provides a starting point.
Sango Capital remains the most credible standalone secondary buyer for African PE assets. Its track record now includes the Synergy transaction, a number of direct portfolio-company secondaries, and ongoing market-building activity in West and East Africa. But Sango’s capacity — even at $670 million AUM — is not sized to absorb the $10 billion overhang. Richard Okello of Sango has been direct about the limitation: “For players from other geographies to come buy secondaries from Africa, the transaction size has to make sense, which means you need lots of sellers willing to sell large chunks.” Africa’s secondary market suffers from a minimum-scale problem: the deals are too small to attract global buyers and too numerous for the handful of local specialists to handle.
What Needs to Happen
The secondary market response to Africa’s exit crisis is genuine and accelerating. The BII pilot has created a transaction precedent that other DFIs can reference. Sango and MeTTa have demonstrated that Africa-specific secondary structures can be executed. The Stears-VP index has begun the work of price discovery. The 2021-2022 vintage VC funds — Norrsken22 ($205M, first close 2022), TLcom Capital TIDE Africa Fund II ($154M, first close 2022), and the tail of the 2019–2021 cohort — will hit their five-year LP pressure points in 2026 and 2027, creating a pipeline of structured secondary needs that the market will have to absorb or defer.
What the market still needs to generate its first GP-led continuation vehicle is a buyer capable of providing liquidity at a credible price for a single Africa PE asset at a $50–150 million size point. Globally, that buyer exists in dozens of institutional forms. In Africa, it does not yet exist at scale. Building it — through DFI mandate expansion, through aggregation of multiple smaller transactions, or through the emergence of a larger Africa secondaries vehicle — is the infrastructure gap that determines whether the GP-led toolkit becomes available before the 2016-to-2019 vintage funds run out of options.
The secondary market is not going to clear $10 billion in a single year. But the first proper infrastructure is now visible. The question is whether it builds fast enough to matter for the funds that are already in extension.
