Tokenisation and African Capital Markets

Most African businesses cannot raise public capital. The listing requirements are out of reach, the bond market is thin, and bank credit is expensive when it is available at all. Meanwhile a great deal of real value on the continent sits in assets that cannot easily be sold in parts: commercial buildings, farmland, infrastructure, receivables, invoices.

Tokenisation is the idea that those two problems are related.

Putting an asset on a blockchain as a divisible, transferable token does a few things at once. A building worth 400 million shillings becomes a thing 400 people can own a piece of. Settlement happens in minutes rather than through a chain of intermediaries. Ownership and transaction history sit in one auditable record. And a market that was previously bounded by who could physically get to Nairobi opens to anyone permitted to hold the token.

The applications people are actually working on are unglamorous and useful. Fractional property ownership. Farmland and agricultural yield. Invoice financing for SMEs that banks will not touch. Infrastructure and green energy projects with long horizons and patient capital.

The part that is harder than the technology

Issuing a token is not difficult. Making it mean something is.

A token representing a warehouse is worth exactly as much as the legal link between the token and the warehouse. That link is a matter of law, registry and enforceable title, not code, and in several African jurisdictions it is not yet clearly established. Kenya's Virtual Asset Service Providers framework, in force since November 2025, puts tokenisation under the Capital Markets Authority, which is the right home for it and a genuine step forward. Other markets in the region are further behind.

Liquidity is the second problem. A fractional asset that nobody trades is simply an illiquid asset with extra steps. Secondary markets have to exist for the fractionalisation to deliver what it promises.

We think the near-term progress will come from a narrow set of cases where the legal position is solid, the underlying asset is well documented, and there is a credible buyer on the other side. Not from tokenising everything at once.

Done carefully, this is one of the few financial innovations that plausibly widens access rather than concentrating it. That is worth getting right.

This article is general commentary, not investment advice. Tokenised assets carry significant risk, including illiquidity and legal uncertainty, and organisations should take independent professional advice.