International Women’s Day often celebrates resilience. But resilience is not a financing strategy. In capital markets, survival is not enough; participation at scale requires structure.
Before I understood reinsurance treaties or surety capacity, I understood something more immediate: the cost of uninsured risk.
A single overseas buyer collapsed. Eighty percent of a company’s revenue disappeared overnight. Goods had shipped. Payments never arrived. There was no credit insurance, no counterparty intelligence, no mitigation in place. The loss wasn’t caused by poor products or weak management. It was caused by exposure that was invisible until it wasn’t.
Across Africa, this is not an isolated story.
SMEs operate in markets where access to structured capital is constrained and contractors face bonding requirements that exclude otherwise capable firms. Africa’s infrastructure ambition is significant. So are its entrepreneurs. Yet participation too often stalls at a single friction point: institutional comfort with risk.
Risk, in itself, is not the barrier. Unstructured risk is.
For years, conversations about African markets in global reinsurance rooms were framed around caution. Capacity existed — alignment did not. In 2015, we began bridging that gap, connecting local corporates and insurers to A-rated international reinsurers without a formal management agent framework to guide us. There was no template. Only conviction that African trade risk could be assessed rigorously, and that global markets would deploy capacity if risk was transparently structured.
Partnerships evolved. Capacity conversations matured. By 2023, long-term commitments dedicated specifically to African trade credit and surety signalled a meaningful shift: from hesitation to engagement.
This is how markets evolve. Not through celebration. Through architecture.
When contractors secure larger bonding lines, when exporters protect receivables across borders, when banks lend with greater confidence, it is not because risk disappeared. It is because risk was engineered.
As a women-led firm in specialty risk, we see this work as responsibility, not symbolism: responsibility to design instruments that unlock participation, to challenge outdated perceptions of African markets, and to ensure ambition is not constrained by avoidable uncertainty.
International Women’s Day should not only ask how many women sit at the table. It should ask whether the systems around that table are designed to enable scale.
Africa does not lack entrepreneurs, expertise, or ambition.
It requires structured confidence.
And structured confidence is capital.