As global capital searches for resilience, yield and long-term growth, Africa is no longer a peripheral conversation. It is becoming central.
From infrastructure and energy transition to capital markets reform and the creative economy, the continent is at an inflection point. Policy ambition now needs to meet deployable capital at scale. That is the context in which the African Markets Conference (AMC 2026), hosted by Standard Bank in Cape Town from 22–24 February, takes on its true significance .
Convening global institutional investors, sovereign wealth funds, policymakers and private-sector leaders, AMC 2026 is designed as a capital-mobilisation platform. It aims to reframe Africa not as a risk to be managed, but as an opportunity to be structured, financed and scaled.
From narrative to mechanism
Africa’s growth challenge is well understood. By 2050, the continent will add nearly one billion people, more than half of them living in cities. Yet annual infrastructure investment remains roughly half of what is required to support that growth. Closing that gap is not a matter of aspiration. It is a matter of market design.
Standard Bank has positioned AMC 2026 around five pillars that move decisively beyond rhetoric. These include infrastructure as an asset class, accelerating the energy transition, deepening African capital markets, enabling intra-African trade under the AfCFTA framework, and addressing sovereign debt sustainability through credibility, structure and affordability.
As Luvuyo Masinda, Chief Executive of Corporate and Investment Banking at Standard Bank Group, has noted, mobilising capital is not just about funding projects. It is about building the foundation of a more balanced and inclusive global economy.
Capital, culture and the creative economy
What distinguishes AMC 2026 is its recognition that Africa’s growth story is no longer confined to traditional sectors alone.
Alongside infrastructure, energy and financial markets, the conference acknowledges the rising importance of the creative economy. This sector sits at the intersection of culture, technology, capital and global influence. From music and film to fashion, sport and digital content, Africa’s creative industries are increasingly investable, exportable and globally competitive.
This is economic power in practice. The creative economy generates jobs, attracts foreign capital, shapes national brands and accelerates cross-border flows of talent and investment. Its inclusion within AMC reflects a more sophisticated understanding of how modern economies scale.
Standard Bank as a market architect
Standard Bank’s leadership in convening AMC 2026 speaks to a broader institutional role it has assumed across the continent.
By bringing policymakers, regulators and capital allocators into the same room, and grounding discussions in liquidity, regulation and bankability, the bank is helping translate African priorities into structures global capital can engage with. The presence of senior Standard Bank leadership, including Group CEO Sim Tshabalala, alongside global asset managers and development finance institutions reinforces that intent.
TIME Africa’s role in amplifying what matters
As a media partner to AMC 2026, TIME Africa’s role is clear. It is to amplify the ideas, institutions and leaders shaping Africa’s economic future and to ensure those conversations reach a global audience that can act on them.
“TIME Africa exists to connect capital, culture and leadership across the continent,” says Josh Wilson, Managing Director of TIME Africa and Group Managing Director of Global Venture Partners. “AMC 2026 is exactly the kind of convening moment that deserves global attention, because it focuses not on what Africa could be, but on how capital is already being mobilised to get it there.”
Through its coverage, convenings and partnerships, TIME Africa seeks to elevate Africa-led solutions, spotlight institutions doing the work and help reframe global perceptions from opportunity theory to execution reality.
A defining moment
AMC 2026 arrives at a moment of global uncertainty, but also of recalibration. As traditional markets mature and geopolitical risk reshapes capital flows, Africa’s relevance is growing.
The question is no longer whether capital will come. It is whether it will be structured, deployed and scaled effectively. Conferences like AMC matter because they sit at the intersection of intent and mechanism. In Africa’s next phase of growth, that intersection is where the future will be built.