Nigeria emerges fastest growing investment hub in Africa

Nigeria has emerged the fastest-growing hub on the continent in terms of capital investments despite its security challenges.

This is according to a recent report by global auditing firm Ernst and Young titled ‘Africa Attractiveness Report 2021’ released on its website.

The report showed Nigeria emerged the fastest-growing hub on the continent in 2020 in terms of capital investments, attracting $6.6 billion, followed by South Africa ($3.8 billion), Angola ($3.1 billion) and Morocco with $2.4 billion in investments.

Nigeria’s strong performance helped rank the West African region high followed by Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.

Eastern Africa received the lowest foreign direct investment (FDI) in 2020 compared to its western and southern Africa counterparts

Kenya was the highest FDI recipient in the region and the fifth in Africa, attracting capital investments worth $500 million last year.

Morocco and Egypt attracted most of the investment in the North while Angola took the lion’s share of FDI in Central Africa.

Part of Ernst and Young report reads: “Africa’s large resource-export-dependent economies felt the impact of commodity price declines and rapidly decreasing demand, particularly from China, causing them to fall into recession.”

It also highlighted that FDI focus was shifting away from extractive industries towards the services.

“Over the last five years, service-based sectors received a total of $158 billion as capital investment, amounting to 45 percent of what was allotted to all industry groups, while the extractives sector accounted for 31 percent of all inbound capital between 2016 and 2020.”

“The telecommunications service sector received the highest capital investment totalling around $8.5billion, with the largest investments focused on Nigeria and South Africa as remote working and hybrid work models raised the demand for transformative business solutions,” the report noted.