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In West Africa, however, a more concrete story is beginning to emerge. The region’s capital markets are expanding, their performance is attracting greater attention and the institutions behind them are increasingly making their case directly to international investors.
At the centre of that shift is the Bourse Régionale des Valeurs Mobilières, or BRVM, the common stock exchange of the eight countries of the West African Economic and Monetary Union, UEMOA. Based in Abidjan, it is the world’s first fully integrated regional stock exchange, serving Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo.
Its recent performance challenges some of the assumptions still attached to African capital markets. Over the past five years, the BRVM Composite Index has almost doubled, rising 99.15%, before adding another 25.26% in 2025. Market capitalisation has reached CFAF 24,781 billion — approximately $40 billion and the equivalent of 18.37% of UEMOA GDP. According to the exchange, returns remain above 8% for equities and around 6% for bonds.
For Constantin Dabiré, a Burkinabè financial entrepreneur and head of the Société Africaine d’Ingénierie et d’Intermédiation Financières, or SA2IF, these numbers point to a broader opportunity.
The question is increasingly not whether West Africa has assets capable of attracting investors. It is how to make those opportunities sufficiently visible, understandable and accessible to capital sitting thousands of kilometres away.
Taking the BRVM story abroad
The BRVM itself has begun addressing that challenge.
Its BRVM Investment Days have taken the regional market to financial centres including London, Paris, New York, Dubai and Johannesburg. Previous editions have each attracted more than 100 investors and finance professionals. In April 2026, the initiative returned to New York’s Nasdaq MarketSite, bringing together institutional investors, advisers, bankers, policymakers and market participants from across the UEMOA and its diaspora.
The purpose is significant. For an exchange representing eight economies, international visibility is not simply a communications exercise. It can help broaden a still relatively concentrated investor base and put regional issuers in front of institutions that might otherwise have little direct exposure to West African markets.
The BRVM is also developing the infrastructure needed to support that ambition. Recent initiatives include work on derivatives, exchange-traded funds and ESG-linked indices, while five green bond issuances have raised close to CFAF 170 billion. Its participation in the African Exchanges Linkage Project is intended to facilitate cross-border investment and increase integration between African markets.
But visibility alone does not automatically translate into investment.
Closing the distance between investors and the market
For Dabiré, the challenge facing West African capital markets is more complicated than a simple shortage of money. The regional investor base remains relatively concentrated, while significant pools of local savings still sit outside the formal financial system. At the same time, international investors may be interested in diversification and higher-growth markets without necessarily having the knowledge, relationships or mechanisms needed to invest in the region.
That distinction matters. A market can perform well and attract attention abroad without yet being easy for a new investor to enter.
Dabiré has repeatedly argued that broadening the investor base is therefore central to the next stage of the UEMOA market’s development. When governments, banks and public companies increasingly turned to regional markets for financing, the same relatively small group of institutional investors found itself being asked to absorb a growing volume of issuance. His answer is not only to bring more investors into the system, but also to find better ways of directing existing liquidity towards productive investment.
International capital is an important part of that equation. Dabiré believes investors outside Africa continue to approach the continent with an overly generalised perception of risk. His argument is not that risks disappear once an investor crosses the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, but that unfamiliarity can lead markets to be assessed less precisely than they should be. He has publicly challenged the assumption that African investments are inherently riskier than comparable opportunities elsewhere, while pointing to the returns available on markets such as the BRVM.
The implication is important for the BRVM’s international push. Investment Days can put West African markets in front of global institutions, but converting that interest into capital requires a second step: making opportunities understandable, accessible and investable.
Giving investors more reasons to enter
That also means developing the market itself.
At the BRVM Investment Days in New York in April, Dabiré argued that deeper capital markets require more than attracting additional money to the assets that already exist. They need new instruments, new issuers and a broader range of opportunities capable of appealing to different types of investors.
One of his proposals is particularly revealing. Dabiré has advocated the development of a dedicated commodities segment on the regional market, allowing products such as West African gold and cotton to be valued closer to where they are produced rather than exclusively through foreign financial centres. In his view, this could attract specialist international investors while encouraging mining and commodity companies operating in the region to raise capital locally — increasing both the BRVM’s capitalisation and the depth of its market.
It fits a broader argument about what makes a financial market attractive. More investors can create greater liquidity, but greater diversity of assets can also attract more investors. Dabiré sees those two developments as mutually reinforcing.
The same logic applies to infrastructure finance. West Africa’s need for roads, energy systems, transport, digital infrastructure and other long-term investments is enormous, but financing does not depend solely on finding institutions willing to provide capital. At the Investment Days, Dabiré placed particular emphasis on what happens before a project ever reaches an investor: feasibility work, financial engineering and structures capable of turning a development need into an investable proposition. In other words, attracting capital and creating assets capable of absorbing it are two sides of the same problem.
Where Sitexco fits
Sitexco Canada should be understood within this larger effort.
Created in 2022, its purpose is to extend the search for investors beyond the relatively limited pool already active in the UEMOA. Dabiré has described the Canadian company as a way of approaching investors in North America and further afield, as well as members of the African diaspora who want exposure to the continent but may not have an obvious route into its financial markets. In his own description, Sitexco is intended to connect those investors with SA2IF and, through it, opportunities in West Africa.
That role becomes more compelling when seen alongside what SA2IF is building in the region itself. The firm has invested heavily in digital access to the market, allowing clients outside West Africa to follow the BRVM, manage their accounts and conduct transactions remotely. Dabiré has also spoken of discussions with international partners intended to make it easier for overseas clients to fund their SA2IF accounts and invest through them.
The ambition, then, is not simply to promote West Africa abroad. It is to reduce some of the practical distance between international capital and the regional market: finding potential investors, giving them a clearer understanding of the opportunities available, and creating channels through which interest can ultimately become participation.
The mandates already undertaken by SA2IF illustrate another part of that model. Dabiré has pointed to work involving the securitisation of domestic debt and the structuring of sukuk, alongside efforts to find investors beyond the UEMOA capable of financing such instruments.
Not foreign capital at any cost
There is another important element to Dabiré’s thinking, however. International investment is not presented as a substitute for developing West Africa’s own financial resources.
His vision is broader: international institutions, diaspora capital and domestic savings should expand the market together.
Dabiré has argued, for example, that considerable amounts of money remain outside formal investment channels in a region where banking penetration remains relatively low. He has suggested infrastructure bonds and diaspora bonds among the mechanisms that could help direct more of those resources towards productive assets.
His interest in expanding the BRVM’s range of products follows the same logic. A commodities segment would not only provide international investors with additional exposure to the region. It could also give pension funds, insurers and individual investors within the UEMOA greater access to sectors that are central to their own economies.
That makes the internationalisation of the BRVM a two-way project rather than a simple search for foreign money. The objective is to connect the region more effectively to global capital while simultaneously making its own capital markets deeper, more diverse and more capable of financing its economies.
The next test for the BRVM
The BRVM’s recent performance has already helped change the conversation around West African capital markets. Its Investment Days are taking that story directly to investors in some of the world’s largest financial centres.
The next test will be whether greater visibility produces sustained participation.
For that to happen, investors need more than an attractive set of performance figures. They need investable assets, credible local counterparts, projects structured to institutional standards and practical routes into the market. The regional market, in turn, needs a broader mix of domestic and international participants if it is to become deeper and more liquid.
Dabiré’s strategy sits at the intersection of those two ambitions. Through SA2IF, he is working on the instruments and infrastructure of the regional market; through Sitexco, he is trying to extend the pool of investors looking at it.
The ambition is therefore larger than attracting foreign capital to a handful of West African projects. It is to help create a market in which capital from Abidjan, Ouagadougou, the African diaspora and international financial centres can increasingly meet on the same platform.
For the BRVM, that may be the real significance of its growing international profile. The measure of success will not simply be how many investors hear the UEMOA story abroad, but how many are ultimately able to enter the market, invest and stay.
