Africa’s telecom bond market has spent much of the past decade caught between promise and perception. On one hand, demand for connectivity has surged, driven by population growth, urbanisation, data-hungry consumers and the steady transition from 3G to 4G and now 5G. On the other hand, global investors have often viewed African telecom debt through a lens of risk.
Between 2021 and 2025, however, the narrative shifted more decisively. Across the continent, telecom operators returned to the bond market in size, refinancing maturing obligations and raising fresh capital for infrastructure expansion.
While no single figure captures Africa’s total telecom bond activity, sector reports and landmark transactions suggest that several billion dollars were raised through corporate bonds and structured debt in recent years. MTN Nigeria pioneered the space in 2018 with a ₦200 billion ($146 million) bond programme aimed at diversifying funding sources and managing local currency exposure.
However, other operators largely stayed on the sidelines until 2022, when Mauritius-based Axian Telecom issued a $460 million bond, signalling a renewed interest in the continent’s telecom debt market.
In July 2025, Axian Telecom again issued a $600 million bond to scale infrastructure across Madagascar, Tanzania and Togo. The deal was twice oversubscribed, attracting an order book of more than $1.3 billion, a clear signal that investor appetite for African digital infrastructure had strengthened.
Meanwhile, IHS Towers remained active in debt markets, reporting total indebtedness of approximately $3.9 billion as of mid-2025 while refinancing high-cost notes and preparing for maturities in 2026 and 2027.
These transactions suggest that Africa’s telecom bond market is reopening in earnest.
At the centre of this revival is a familiar but often underestimated player: the anchor investor. Typically, a major institutional player, such as a pension fund, mutual fund, or insurance company, an anchor investor commits to purchasing a substantial block of securities ahead of an IPO, helping to stabilise demand and build market confidence.
This matters because the telecom bond market, where companies raise debt from investors by issuing tradable securities, provides the long-term, reliable capital required to build digital infrastructure at scale.
Fibre networks, towers, data centres and 5G deployments demand heavy upfront investment that far exceeds what operators can fund from revenue alone. When the bond market works well, it gives operators access to affordable financing for network expansion, spectrum acquisition and rural coverage.
“Bonds remain one of the most underused but strategic financing tools in telecoms,” said Rotimi Akapo, Partner and head of Telecommunications, Media and Technology (TMT), Advocaat Law Practice. “They allow operators to raise long-term capital at scale, match funding to the life of network infrastructure, and expand their networks and infrastructure without diluting ownership. In emerging markets, a functioning telecom bond market can be a real backbone for financing the digital economy.”
Reframing the funding narrative
A common misconception about Africa’s digital infrastructure is that the continent suffers from a chronic lack of capital.
Folatomi Fayemi, Investment Specialist at Ninety One, which manages the Emerging Africa & Asia Infrastructure Fund (EAAIF), said the issue is less about the absolute availability of funding and more about structure, confidence and signalling. EAAIF was the anchor investor in the Axian Telecom $600 million bond issue.
“There can be slight misconceptions as to the availability of funding because of the amount of demand that is required,” he said. “There is funding that’s coming. And there’s always going to be more funding because of the infrastructure divide we have on the continent. The demands keep growing; they don’t slow down. You just keep needing to deploy.”
Two of the world’s ten largest telecom infrastructure companies by scale are African-focused tower firms. IHS Towers and Helios Towers are both listed companies that have built businesses centred overwhelmingly on Africa’s connectivity needs.
In 2024 alone, IHS raised more than $1 billion in bonds, while Helios Towers executed a similarly large issuance. In 2025, these firms continued reshaping their balance sheets, refinancing debt and extending maturities.
“These are businesses that are raising large bonds,” Fayemi said. “You’re talking about roughly $1.8 billion-plus going into two companies focused primarily on connectivity across Africa.” EAAIF anchored the IHS Towers and Helios’ combined over $1.8 billion bond issuances in 2024.
For Fayemi, this scale underscores an important shift: telecom infrastructure in Africa is increasingly seen as a growth story anchored in demographic fundamentals.
“Population growth matters,” he said. “When you step back and look at markets like Nigeria, where you already have three or four operators, it’s not about adding more players. It’s about meeting growing demand. For these businesses, this is growth.”
The rise of specialisation
One structural shift underpinning renewed investor confidence is the shift away from vertically integrated telecom operators toward specialised infrastructure providers.
Globally, mobile operators are shifting away from owning every part of their networks. Towers, fibre, data centres and related services are now often run by specialist companies that can invest and operate more efficiently. This has led many operators to sell their tower assets to TowerCos to free up capital and reduce maintenance costs.
Vodafone moved 55,000 sites into Vantage Towers, Deutsche Telekom grouped its towers under DFMG, and U.S. carriers like Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile sold large portfolios to American Tower and Crown Castle. Zain adopted a sale-and-leaseback model with IHS Towers, while Telefónica sold towers to KKR and partnered with American Tower.
Africa follows the same trajectory. Tower companies focus on site acquisition and maintenance. Fibre operators invest in long-haul and metro networks. Data centre companies specialise in power redundancy and cooling systems. This specialisation improves capital allocation and creates clearer revenue visibility.
For bond investors, clarity matters. Telecom infrastructure assets typically generate predictable, long-term cash flows backed by multi-year contracts with mobile operators. That predictability aligns well with institutional investors seeking duration and yield.
In 2025, this clarity coincided with a broader financing pivot. Across Africa’s tech and telecom ecosystem, debt accounted for 41% of total funding, reaching a record $1.6 billion, a 63% increase from 2024, based on the 2025 Partech Africa Tech VC Report.
Several mega-deals exceeding $100 million were structured as debt rather than equity. Even companies operating at the intersection of telecom and fintech, such as Senegal’s Wave, secured $137 million in debt financing in July 2025 to expand mobile money operations.
Rather than diluting equity in volatile valuation environments, operators increasingly turned to structured borrowing.
Why anchor investors matter
In risk-averse markets, particularly during global volatility, the presence of a credible anchor investor can determine whether a deal succeeds.
“It’s super important,” Fayemi said of the signalling role. “You have good businesses in Africa. The world needs to know that you have good businesses in Africa. These businesses need to have access to the market.”
However, the local debt environment still has limitations, especially in Nigeria.
Here, Wole Adetuyi of Swift Telephone Networks, an internet service provider, offers an important counterweight to the optimistic narrative. While bonds are an option, he cautions that only a small subset of telecom operators can realistically access that market.
“The bond option is available, although it is important to note that only investment-grade companies can raise bonds in Nigeria easily (BBB rating and above),” Adetuyi said. “In addition, the regulatory requirements for issuing a bond or any other debt instruments are quite high.”
He also notes that most Nigerian telecom operators are not listed, which shuts them out of conventional public-debt avenues.
“Given that most Telcos aren’t listed on an exchange, the only option to raise debt publicly would be through the issuance of commercial paper (CP),” he explained. “But there’s doubt that the CP market has the depth to fully subscribe to a multi-million-dollar note issuance.”
For that reason, Adetuyi argues that alternative structures may be more practical.
“For me, mezzanine financing through a private-equity fundraise would be easier, frankly.”
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Blended finance as catalyst
Anchor investing in African telecom bonds is often tied to blended finance structures. EAAIF adopts this model.
“We manage $1.6 billion in assets,” Fayemi explained. “About $1.3 billion is deployed. We’re a blended finance vehicle.”
The fund combines first-loss equity from development partners, including the UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden and other European governments, with debt raised from development finance institutions and private institutional investors such as Allianz, Standard Bank and Absa.
“Most of the capital is actually debt,” Fayemi said. “We want to invest in impactful projects that are durable and sustainable, and also earn a return for our investors. Impact matters first and foremost.”
This structure allows EAAIF to crowd in private capital while maintaining commercial discipline, enabling it to act as an anchor on telecom bonds and support long-term financing structures.
Few examples illustrate the catalytic role of anchors better than Sonatel (Société Nationale des Télécommunications du Sénégal), a telecom operator in Senegal. EAAIF anchored the company’s first bond issuance in 2014. A decade later, it supported West Africa’s first digital infrastructure securitisation.
“That was actually the first digital securitisation in West African markets,” Fayemi said. “What was important there was crowding in not only institutional investors, but also the local market.”
Balancing currency exposure
Currency management is one of the most complex challenges in telecom financing. Most network equipment is priced in dollars or euros, meaning operators must borrow in hard currency. But excessive reliance on foreign-currency debt exposes companies to exchange-rate swings, which can quickly erode profitability.
This risk became painfully clear during the 2024–2025 “Naira Shock.” Following Nigeria’s exchange-rate unification in 2023, the value of dollar-denominated liabilities surged. MTN Nigeria posted its first-ever loss, recording ₦740 billion ($816 million) in FX losses, while Airtel Africa fell from a $750 million profit to an $89 million loss due to currency devaluations in Nigeria, Malawi, Zambia, and Kenya.
Operators responded by localising their debt: by September 2025, MTN Nigeria had shifted 95% of its operating debt into naira, cutting net debt from ₦719.5 billion ($525.7 million) to ₦171 billion ($124.9 million), while Airtel repaid $702 million in foreign-currency debt.
The trade-off is that local debt reduces currency risk but comes at a higher cost, with Airtel’s effective interest rate rising from 10.1% to 13%.
The 2025 refinancing wave reflects growing financial sophistication. MTN Nigeria’s local-currency programme hedges naira revenues, while CFA franc markets, with their euro pegs, help reduce currency mismatch risk. Large listed firms, including Helios Towers, continue to access global markets while selectively tapping local funding to manage exposure.
Anchor investors play a critical role in this balancing act, providing credibility and capital that support both hard-currency and domestic transactions. Their involvement helps stabilise deals, reassure markets, and ensure operators can manage currency risk without compromising long-term investment in infrastructure.
A market reopening
Africa’s telecom bond market may not become risk-free as macroeconomic volatility and regulatory shifts will remain constant. But 2025 marked a turning point. Oversubscribed issuances, record debt funding across the tech and telecom ecosystem, and multi-hundred-million-dollar raises by companies such as Axian Telecom and MTN Nigeria reflect renewed confidence.
Anchor investors are central to that evolution. By absorbing early risk, structuring transactions and signalling credibility, they are helping bridge Africa’s connectivity ambitions with global capital markets.
Over time, as track records deepen and local markets strengthen, reliance on anchors may diminish. But for now, they remain a decisive force, not merely reviving Africa’s telecom bond market, but reinforcing the financial architecture underpinning the continent’s digital expansion.