African Century is building a number of substantial businesses across sub-Saharan Africa.

The focus is on developing businesses that provide products and services to the growing African domestic and regional markets, and in particular respond to the growth in urbanisation. We are concentrated on business sectors where we can build scale and where we can replicate our IP and business models across different countries.

Our focus areas are the food sector; financial services; real estate and agriculture. Over time, we will develop into other sectors where we believe we can have an impact.

African Century’s existing operations are in Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Our group head office is in Mauritius, and we have country offices in Harare in Zimbabwe, in Maputo in Mozambique and in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, supported by a small London team. African Century is developing businesses that are able to expand domestically and regionally. In some cases we acquire small and medium-sized privately owned businesses which give us the platform from which we can develop larger businesses. Often these businesses benefit from increased access to capital and management support. Increasingly, we start and develop our own businesses, often replicating successful businesses that we are already operating.

African Century is an active investor; as well as providing capital for growth, we bring operational, financial and strategic expertise, and we can facilitate fund-raising for our operations. While our businesses are all run by local management teams, the African Century Group team are very involved with the day to day operations of the businesses. Close relationships based on respect, trust and transparency are fundamental to all of our operations.

Our focus is on delivering consistent high levels of organic revenue and profit growth, driven by ongoing investment in our existing platforms.

We are structured as a privately owned corporate – this gives us the flexibility to be able to take decisions and invest for the longer term good of the businesses. Fundamentally, we are concerned with building strong and substantial businesses with good governance, high quality products and services, and managed by first class management teams.

African Century was initially funded by the founding partners and other private investors. Subsequently our growth has been funded through a combination of our own cash generation; institutional co-investment and bank debt. The business works closely with our Development Finance Institutions (DFI) partners who provide grant, equity and debt funding. As our Group grows and we expand our existing businesses and develop new ones, we work with co-investors who share both our values and our investment approach, which we believe will over the medium and long-term deliver excellent returns.