Is it getting trendy to invest in Africa?

Mainstream interest

Lately I’ve seen a lot of mainstream articles, blog posts and reports speaking positively about investing in Africa, and even a new mutual fund launched to invest in Africa:

• New York based asset manager Nile Capital Management launches a Pan African Mutual Fund [April 29, 2010]

• Forbes article about Nile Capital and investing in Africa  [August 24, 2010]

• The Becker-Posner Blog [June 6, 2010] – Will Africa Finally Take Off

• McKinsey Quarterly – What’s Driving Africa’s Growth and the previously mentioned Lions on the Move report

• Boston Consulting Group – The African Challengers

• Wall Street Journal – Bull’s Eye On Africa: Carlyle Chief Sees Upside [July 2, 2010]  (gated)

• Barron’s cover [August 2, 2010]- The Final Frontier, A Changing Africa Offers Opportunities to Investors

• Financial Times series on Emerging Africa

• IMF Regional Economic Outlook April 2010 – Subsaharan Africa Back to High Growth?

• CNBC [June 30, 2010] – Investing in Africa

• Seeking Alpha – Why Frontier Market ETFs May Be the Next Big Thing

• Kevin O’Marah, Gartner  – The African Century

Oh, they have a name for it now!

So, ehm, what’s going on here? Guess it’s good news if this is a new trend. On the other hand, I can’t help to think a bit along the lines of the following quote:

“Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.”
Oscar Wilde

I recall investor Jim Roger’s reaction when he first heard the term “Frontier Markets”:  “Oh, they have a name for it now!” Then he said something along the lines of that not being a good sign and that it might be time to invest somewhere else.

Anyhow, I think it will take some time before any of this trend following capital will find its way into real estate in Yopougon and raise prices. At the moment, my feeling is that most people investing in residential housing in Yopougon are individual Ivorians living in Europe or North America.

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I got one more thing I like about the Yopougon investment in the previous post:

• It allows me to get to see how things really work in practice on the ground, giving an insight into the economy on a micro-level which is hard to obtain in any other way – a bit like the Portfolios of the Poor study.