Africa links 11 stock exchanges as AELP Phase II launches
At the BAFM Forum in Dar es Salaam, regulators launched the next phase of the project stitching Africa's stock markets together, and named the youth as the next investor class.
Africa's long-promised integrated capital market took a concrete step in Dar es Salaam. At the 13th Building African Financial Markets Forum, the African Securities Exchanges Association launched Phase II of the African Exchange Linkage Project.
The project, built with the African Development Bank, connects stock exchanges so participating brokers can execute cross-border trades through a common platform.
Phase II expands the network to 11 African stock exchanges and more than 50 stockbrokers, with Botswana, Ghana, Eswatini, and Uganda joining the linkage. The goal is a more integrated African capital market by 2030.
The plain-English version: a broker in Nairobi should be able to put a client's money into a listed company in Lagos, Accra, Johannesburg, or another linked market without the investor opening a foreign broker account and fighting a maze of paperwork.
For African markets that are often small and thinly traded in isolation, pooling buyers and sellers across borders is one of the most practical ways to deepen liquidity.
The forum also pointed to who the buyers of the future might be. With a young population, African exchanges are looking at products such as exchange-traded funds and tokenised real-world assets as more accessible entry points than old paperwork-heavy share accounts.
Tanzania used the stage to show its own alternative-finance progress, including Sukuk issuances totalling around 260 million US dollars.
The caveat is important. Market linkage is plumbing, and plumbing changes behaviour slowly. Currencies still complicate settlement, investor education remains uneven, and a platform cannot create liquidity by itself.
Still, this is the same pattern we see across African finance: fragmented national systems slowly being stitched into something larger. The second-wave fintech story is about the same thing from a startup angle, explained at /business/african-fintech-second-wave-credit. This is the capital-market version.
FAQ
What is the African Exchange Linkage Project?
It is an ASEA and African Development Bank project connecting African stock exchanges so brokers can execute cross-border trades through a common platform.
How many exchanges are connected in Phase II?
Phase II expands the network to 11 African stock exchanges and more than 50 participating stockbrokers.
What could this mean for ordinary investors?
Over time, it could make it easier to buy shares listed in other African countries through a local broker, while supporting products such as ETFs.
Sources
Owning a slice of Africa's best companies is not yet as easy as a mobile-money transfer. AELP Phase II moves the continent a little closer.
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