There Is No Funding Gap in Africa. Here's What's Actually Missing — The Samuele Tini Show - where business, innovation, and sustainability converge

Listen in the Podli app 🎧

Follow your favourite podcasts, listen offline and in the car with CarPlay and Android Auto, and always pick up where you left off. Free to try.

"There is no funding gap in Africa."

That is the provocation from Burak Buyuksaraç, CEO of Afri Capital and a 16-year business veteran in Tanzania. He arrived in Dar es Salaam in 2010 as a mining executive, stayed to build a diversified portfolio across tourism, security, insurance, consultancy and trading, and now runs one of East Africa's newer investment firms.

In this episode we unpack why the real bottleneck in African SME finance is not capital but pipeline. Why smaller tickets are harder to raise than larger ones. Why Tanzanian banks demand 125% collateral for a loan. And why Burak sees Africa and Latin America as the only two regions left on the planet with genuine room to grow.

Burak shares two recent Afri Capital deals: a $15M refinancing for an Arusha agro-processor and a $3.5M facility for a Tanzanian bank servicing the education ecosystem.

Essential listening for founders, impact investors, DFI teams and anyone working on SME finance in emerging markets.