From Framework to Market: The Harder Part of Tokenising African Assets

Africa's Real Assets Are Not the Problem. Access Is. Every serious investor conversation about Africa eventually arrives at the same destination. The assets are there. The farmland. The mineral royalties. The commercial property in Nairobi, Lusaka, Harare. The infrastructure concessions generating predictable, inflation-linked revenue. The productive assets that institutional investors in other contexts pay premium multiples for. The conversation stalls not because the assets lack merit. It stalls because no one has a clean answer to the access question. ________________________________________ The Structural Gap When a pension fund in London or a family office in Dubai wants exposure to German commercial real estate, the infrastructure exists to facilitate that — REITs, open-ended property funds, listed vehicles, bilateral private transactions with established legal frameworks and liquid secondary markets. When the same pension fund wants exposure to a commercial property in Harare, or a platinum royalty stream in Zimbabwe, or a solar concession in Zambia — the options narrow dramatically. Direct ownership requires incorporating a local entity, navigating exchange control regulations, finding a local custodian willing to hold the asset, and accepting that exit may require finding a single bilateral buyer in a thin market. The legal cost of structuring a USD 500,000 transaction may consume 15–20% of the investment. The minimum ticket that justifies those costs places the asset out of reach for most mandates. The result is a paradox. Africa holds a disproportionate share of the world's productive real assets — land, minerals, infrastructure — and a disproportionately small share of institutional investment capital. The gap is not a perception problem. It is a plumbing problem. ________________________________________ What Tokenisation Actually Is — and What It Isn't The word tokenisation has been polluted by association with cryptocurrency speculation. It is worth separating the concept from that context. At its core, tokenisation of a real-world asset is a legal and administrative process, not a technological one. A company incorporates a Special Purpose Vehicle to hold a specific asset — a building, a royalty agreement, a farm. The SPV issues shares. Those shares are divided into units — tokens — and recorded on a digital ledger. A token holder is a registered shareholder of the SPV. Their ownership right derives from company law, not from the underlying technology. The technology provides three practical improvements over traditional structures: it removes geographic barriers to ownership transfer, it automates the distribution of income to all shareholders proportionally and simultaneously, and it enables a secondary market that is not bounded by exchange hours or bilateral negotiation. None of this requires the speculative dynamics of cryptocurrency markets. The token is a digital record of a company law right. Its value is determined by the underlying asset — the rent roll, the royalty stream, the concession revenue — not by market sentiment about a protocol. The largest financial institutions in the world understood this distinction several years ago. JPMorgan's Onyx platform has processed over a trillion dollars in tokenised settlement since 2020. BlackRock's BUIDL fund raised $500 million in its opening weeks. The World Bank has been issuing blockchain-based bonds since 2018. These are not speculative instruments. They are conventional financial instruments using a more efficient infrastructure. ________________________________________ Why Emerging Markets Are Different In developed markets, tokenisation is primarily an efficiency play. Settlement that takes T+2 days becomes atomic. Distribution processing that takes 60 days becomes automated. The underlying markets are already deep, liquid, and legally well-defined. Tokenisation makes them faster and cheaper. In emerging markets, the stakes are different. The question is not whether tokenisation improves an existing, functioning market. The question is whether it can create a functional market where one has not previously existed — providing access to assets that are productive and valuable but structurally inaccessible to most capital. That is a more interesting problem. It is also a harder one. The additional complexity in emerging markets is regulatory. An investor holding tokens in a SPAC listed on a well-regulated exchange in New York has clear legal recourse and a clear understanding of what they own. An investor holding tokens purporting to represent ownership of a Zimbabwean commercial property needs the same clarity — and that clarity requires a statutory framework that explicitly classifies the instrument as a regulated security, defines the custodial obligations, and establishes the supervisory authority. For most of Africa, that framework has not existed. ________________________________________ What Changed in Zimbabwe in 2025 Finance Act No. 7 of 2025 inserted Part VA into Zimbabwe's Securities and Exchange Act. The provision creates a formal licensing framework for digital capital markets under the Securities and Exchange Commission of Zimbabwe, explicitly classifying SPV-backed tokens as SECZ-regulated securities. The practical implication of that classification is significant. It means the instrument is not a virtual asset — not in the regulatory grey zone where most crypto products sit. It is a security with the same investor protections, the same SECZ oversight, and the same legal enforceability as a share listed on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange. Zimbabwe is the first jurisdiction in SADC to pass legislation of this nature. That does not mean the ecosystem is mature. It means the legal foundation on which a functional market can be built now exists. The difference between a framework existing and a market existing is several years of operational experience, institutional participation, and trust-building. But the framework is the precondition. ________________________________________ The Diaspora Capital Question There is a second dimension to this conversation that institutional analysis tends to underweight. The Zimbabwean diaspora remits approximately USD 1.5 billion annually to Zimbabwe. The broader Sub-Saharan African diaspora sends over USD 50 billion a year to the continent. These flows are among the most consistent and resilient capital streams in global finance — they held up through the 2008 financial crisis and through COVID at a time when foreign direct investment collapsed. Almost none of it is invested. It flows into consumption — school fees, medical bills, housing maintenance — and stays there. The reason is not lack of interest. Survey data consistently shows that diaspora communities want to invest in their countries of origin. The reason is the same access problem that faces institutional investors, compressed into a smaller ticket: the minimum required to justify the legal structure of a direct investment is beyond what most individual remitters can deploy. Fractional ownership of regulated digital securities changes the minimum threshold. Whether that is relevant to your portfolio depends on whether you view diaspora capital as a constituency worth building products for. In the context of African markets, it is the largest pool of retail capital with an explicit appetite for exposure to the continent. That is not a trivial observation. ________________________________________ What Is Still Missing Being clear about what does not yet exist is as important as describing what does. Liquid secondary markets for tokenised African assets do not exist yet. The regulatory frameworks in most SADC jurisdictions are not yet in place. Custodial infrastructure — the reliable, insured, regulated custody of the underlying assets that institutional investors require before committing capital — is nascent. The independent valuation ecosystem needed to provide credible, recurring asset certification at scale is still being assembled. These are not insurmountable problems. They are the problems that take five to ten years to solve in any emerging market infrastructure build. Knowing where in that timeline you are — and whether you are the kind of investor who builds infrastructure or the kind who deploys capital into proven infrastructure — is the relevant question for any specific mandate. ________________________________________ The question I find most interesting is not whether tokenisation of African real assets will happen. Given the regulatory momentum and the scale of the unmet demand, that outcome seems reasonably certain over a ten-year horizon. The more interesting question is who establishes the governance standards, the valuation frameworks, and the market conventions during the early period — and whether those standards are designed to protect investors or to facilitate capital raising. Early markets in any new asset class are shaped by the norms established at the beginning. That is worth paying attention to regardless of your investment horizon. The real test then is, is the structural case for tokenising African real assets sound? The assets exist. The demand exists. The regulatory groundwork — at least in Zimbabwe — now exists. What remains to be built is the harder, slower work of market infrastructure: liquid secondary markets, trusted custodians, independent valuation standards, and the operational experience that turns a legal framework into a functioning ecosystem. That gap between possible and prudent will define the next several years. For most institutional mandates, African tokenised assets remain a prospect for patient, early-stage capital rather than mainstream deployment. The capital that does enter now will shape the norms that govern the market for decades. And that is where the most consequential choices lie. Early markets in any new asset class are path-dependent. The governance standards established now — whether they prioritise investor protection or capital-raising convenience, whether they demand transparent valuation or accept opacity, whether they build trust or exploit information asymmetry — will harden into convention long before the market matures. Even though it is inevitable that the tokenisation of African assets will happen. The more important issue is how it happens. The tension between building lasting trust and capturing first-mover advantage is where the real story will unfold. Investors, regulators, and platform operators alike would do well to recognise that the norms they establish in these early years will outlast any single transaction — and will determine whether this becomes a genuine market or merely a series of extractive offerings dressed in digital infrastructure. ________________________________________ The writer is a corporate finance practitioner who has spent fifteen years structuring capital transactions in Zimbabwe and Southern Africa, and is a Co-Founder of TokenEquityX, Zimbabwe's first regulated digital capital markets platform.