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# Building Resilient Portfolios Across Africa: Gene Grand on Multi-Market Strategy
- URL: https://www.techloy.com/building-resilient-portfolios-across-africa-gene-grand-on-multi-market-strategy-2/
- Published: 2026-09-30T08:34:57.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-30T08:34:56.000Z
- Description: It is easier to build relationships, track regulatory change, and develop institutional knowledge in a single jurisdiction than to manage several at once.
- Author: Partner Content
- Tags: / Featured, Business Finance

Growth-focused investors often approach Africa as a single opportunity, or concentrate in Kenya simply because it is the market they know best. [Gene Grand](https://www.crunchbase.com/person/gene-grand) argues for a different starting point: a pan-African approach built deliberately across Kenya, Nigeria, and other jurisdictions, each with its own regulatory cycle, its own economic drivers, and its own growth trajectory that rarely moves in step with its neighbours.

The instinct to concentrate in one familiar market is understandable. It is easier to build relationships, track regulatory change, and develop institutional knowledge in a single jurisdiction than to manage several at once. Grand's argument is that this convenience carries a real cost, because it leaves a portfolio fully exposed to whatever happens to that market's particular cycle.

Recent regional data illustrates the point sharply. Private capital activity in Africa, meaning investments by venture capital, private equity, private debt and infrastructure investors, held broadly steady in the first nine months of 2025, with 341 deals recorded across the continent, according to the African Private Capital Association. Beneath that total, individual regions diverged considerably: West Africa recorded 73 deals worth US$0.3 billion, an 8% year-on-year decline that the report itself describes as modest, while East Africa recorded 82 worth US$0.5 billion, up 4% and its second-highest Q1-Q3 total on record. A portfolio concentrated in the weaker market would have faced a noticeably different deal environment from one exposed across both.

"Markets facing regulatory headwinds in one year frequently present the strongest entry points in the next," Grand has said. "But you only get to capture that if you already have some form of presence there. You can't rotate into a market you've never bothered to understand."

## What continent-wide macro data actually shows

The broader continental backdrop reinforces why market selection matters as much as market entry. In its April 2026 update, the World Bank described Sub-Saharan Africa's growth as holding steady overall at a regional level, even as the outlook has been revised downward and risks are weighted toward the downside, with debt service pressures mounting. Inflation, by contrast, has been easing: the regional median fell from 4.4% in 2024 to 3.7% in 2025 and slowed in 33 of 47 economies, though the World Bank projects a rise to 4.8% as geopolitical pressures feed through. A regional average, however, tends to obscure exactly the divergence that makes multi-market positioning valuable. The IMF's April 2026 outlook for the region similarly points to uneven pressure across countries, with growth slowing overall as external shocks work through the system unevenly by jurisdiction.

Gene Grand's reading of this data is that averages are precisely where risk hides. "The regional growth number is a useful headline, but it's not what any single portfolio actually experiences," he has said. "What matters is which specific markets you're in when the shock hits, and whether you're diversified enough that a downturn in one doesn't sink the whole position."

## Borrowing the logic from other asset classes

Grand's multi-market thinking draws on a pattern institutional investors have already worked through in other emerging-market contexts. Broader emerging-market investing has moved away from treating the entire category as a single monolithic bloc, toward building strategies around smaller regional groupings that behave differently from one another, a shift driven by recognition that dispersion of returns within the category has been widening rather than narrowing. Grand applies the same logic to Africa, even though the specific markets and drivers involved differ entirely: treat the continent as a set of related but distinct cycles, not a single undifferentiated opportunity.

A parallel argument emerges from general corporate resilience thinking. Organisations across industries have increasingly shifted from narrow, reactive risk management toward broader strategic resilience planning that anticipates disruption rather than merely responding once it arrives. Grand applies the same principle at the portfolio level: build the capacity to absorb a shock in any single market before that shock occurs, rather than treating diversification as something arranged only after the first market turns.

## What diversification is actually for

"Effective diversification across Africa isn't about spreading capital evenly across every market you can find," Gene Grand has said. "It's about understanding how individual markets cycle, and positioning capital deliberately to meet them at the right point in that cycle."

For investors and portfolio companies operating across the continent, Grand's framework is straightforward in principle, if demanding in practice: understand each market's regulatory and economic rhythm individually, hold exposure across more than one of them, and treat a downturn in any single jurisdiction as an entry signal for capital already positioned to respond, rather than as a reason to retreat from the continent altogether.