Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission is spearheading efforts to create a more transparent, welcoming investment environment.

We talk to ’Timi Agama, Director General of the SEC and one of the key architects of Nigeria’s new Investments and Securities Act, about building investor confidence in Nigeria’s markets, and potentially unleashing a flood of domestic and international capital.

We also discuss the leading global role Nigeria hopes to play in the future of digital assets.

Tarik Senhaji, the CEO of the Casablanca Stock Exchange in Morocco, joins us to talk about Morocco’s role in West Africa and beyond, the stock exchange’s ingenious strategy for encouraging more firms to list, and the impact of generational change in Morocco.

Florizelle Lisser, the head of the US-based Corporate Council on Africa, joins us to talk about new opportunities emerging for American companies to invest into Africa. She also shares some unique insights about investment trends—and how to tap into funding from development finance institutions.

The World Bank’s private-sector investing arm, the IFC, is pushing into deep-tech investing to help supercharge its efforts to support equitable and sustainable development around the world.

We talk to Bill Sonneborn, the IFC’s director of disruptive technologies and funds, about green steel, AI, learning technology and opportunities for smaller emerging markets to benefit from breakthrough technologies.

The tiny East African nation of Djibouti plays an outsize role in tackling conflicts and crises in the Horn of Africa region. We talk to Mohamed Siad Doualeh, Djibouti’s ambassador to the US, about Djibouti’s responsibility as a peacemaker in the Horn of Africa region, and its determination to expand its role as a trade and diplomatic hub. 

All of Africa will benefit if the region’s problems can be solved, Doualeh says. “Africa is losing billions of dollars a year to conflict, and it’s high time we turned that around.”

Josh Rubin, portfolio manager at $40+ billion asset manager Thornburg’s Developing World fund, joins us for a stroll through key emerging and frontier markets regions. He digs into the impact of recent developments in China, investment opportunities in the Middle East, why Saudi Arabia appears to be tightening its friendships with a host of nations that are not considered exactly friendly to the West, and how a slight change in sentiment among global investors could tip off much greater changes in emerging markets.

Impact investors  and cryptocurrency advocates have long talked about the potential for blockchain-based technology to transform the lives of people in small emerging markets. The NGO Mercy Corps put its money where its mouth is with an impact fund focused specifically on using the tech to solve some of the gnarliest problems in human development, disaster response and financial inclusion. 

In this pod, Mercy Corps Ventures’ Ken Kou shares insights and learnings from their adventures in Web3.

It turns out that crypto’s ‘killer app’ might be that it can save lives.