Senegal and Liberia have acceded to the Fund for Export Development in Africa, while Angola and Zimbabwe have ratified its founding agreement, strengthening the continent-wide investment vehicle’s ability to finance industrial and trade-related projects.
The moves bring the number of countries participating in FEDA, the equity investment arm of the African Export-Import Bank, to 24, according to the bank. The fund said the expanded membership would widen its ability to invest in sectors including logistics, agro-processing, energy, manufacturing, financial services and mineral processing.
The developments come as African governments and regional financial institutions seek to mobilise more long-term capital for industrialisation and to develop domestic processing capacity rather than exporting commodities in largely unprocessed form.
FEDA provides equity, quasi-equity and other forms of long-term capital to businesses and projects intended to support economic diversification, regional integration and export development.
George Elombi, president and chairman of both Afreximbank and FEDA, said the latest accessions reflected growing confidence in African-owned financial institutions.
“These latest membership milestones demonstrate the growing confidence of African governments in the institutions they own and control.”
Elombi said FEDA’s financing instruments would become increasingly important to the Afreximbank Group’s industrialisation strategy, particularly for projects at national and regional level.
“FEDA’s equity and quasi-equity instruments will become critical to executing strategic industrial projects,” he said, adding that its expanding membership could help catalyse investment across the continent.
Emmanuel Assiak, FEDA’s chief executive, said the new members would expand the fund’s potential investment markets and create opportunities to develop regional value chains.
“Senegal, Liberia, Angola and Zimbabwe each offer compelling opportunities for investment across strategic sectors of their economies,” Assiak said.
The fund is expected to work with governments and private investors to identify projects with commercial potential while seeking to attract additional capital alongside its own resources.
FEDA’s expansion comes alongside a sharp increase in its financial backing from Afreximbank. The bank’s commitment to the fund has risen from $100mn to $1.3bn over the past five years, according to FEDA.
The increase gives the fund greater capacity to pursue investments across sectors that African governments have identified as priorities for industrial development, including manufacturing, agriculture, infrastructure and critical minerals.
For countries such as Angola and Zimbabwe, the emphasis on mineral processing is particularly significant as African economies seek to capture more value from natural resources before export. The fund’s broader mandate also covers financial services, technology, consumer goods, transport and logistics and trade-enabling infrastructure.
FEDA was established by Afreximbank as an impact-investment subsidiary focused on addressing what it describes as a multi-billion-dollar financing gap in Africa, particularly in equity capital.
Afreximbank, headquartered in Cairo, is a pan-African multilateral financial institution that finances intra- and extra-African trade. At the end of 2025, the bank reported total assets and contingencies of more than $48.5bn and shareholder funds of $8.4bn.
The expansion of FEDA’s membership adds to Afreximbank’s broader effort to increase the availability of African-based financing for companies and projects linked to intra-African trade and the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area.
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