Analysis in brief: Investors seeking profits in Africa are centring their focus on four broad sectors: energy, agriculture, healthcare and infrastructure. The application of new technologies is making opportunities in Africa even more appealing for the new year.
This article focuses on four key economic sectors that will drive investment trends across Africa in 2025, emphasizing their Pan-African scope rather than focusing on specific countries. For example, every African country has an agriculture sector in need of expansion, and each has (to some degree) sunshine and wind that can be harnessed as a source for clean and renewable energy, with the consequence that investors are focusing on the development of technologies and energy solutions that may be applied in most parts of Africa. Healthcare is another area whose scope is continental, yet every country has infrastructure requiring improvement.
Africa has two assets in particular that will fuel investment in 2025. The first is demographics. As Africa’s population rises, so too expands its economic middle class. With this growth comes an enlarging pool of customers for consumer goods, energy, food and healthcare. Partly, this is inertia that is the result of overall population growth. However, Africa’s overall prosperity – measured from GDP to UNDP’s classic indicators like who has access to a toilet (indicating improved hygiene) and who has a refrigerator (signalling availability of electricity and improved food storage in a household) – have been steadily rising throughout the 21st century. Additionally, the adoption of new technologies has driven investment in the four fields highlighted in this article. Climate change mitigation is also an important movement, and this appears extensively throughout investment trends as well.
Energy
Africa’s swing toward clean energies will see countries’ ambitious plans to wean themselves from fossil fuels grow closer to achievement. While Kenya will further expand its geothermal capacity to generate electricity in 2025, all African countries with projects large and small will exploit their abundant natural resources for energy solutions, including solar, wind, and hydroelectric resources. The main attraction for investors in Africa’s energy sector is its profitability, particularly as new technological solutions come onto the market, allowing for the expanding reach of energy access.
Africa requires US$200 billion in investment to meet its energy needs, according to the International Energy Agency. Off-grid solutions will continue to be the most active investments in 2025, enabling greater connectivity for more remote areas. China has targeted 30 clean energy projects to receive a portion of its US$51 billion investment in Africa’s energy sector, and the funds will flow in 2025. However, private investors are driving the financing the bulk of new projects.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2023
Agriculture
In 2025, as in ancient times, agriculture is the main segment of African economies. While food production remains the primary employer of Africans, the year will see movement of workers from fields to value-added food processing as investment returns are higher on industrial agriculture and manufactured food products. Consumers’ changing tastes toward healthier foods will keep this segment innovative as well, as agricultural practices are improved and the cold storage transport system is further developed.
Investment in agriculture in 2025 will stimulate many growth markets. Such stimulus could see the expansion of citrus cultivation in South Africa or greater wheat production in Botswana as new irrigation projects come online. More fish farms will be operating in East Africa. There will also be an increase of the development of local luxury food items like designer chocolates in Ghana, marula fruit cosmetics in Eswatini and caviar production in the highlands of Madagascar (the only place in Africa where this luxury item is made). Whatever the investment type, the result will add to food security – a goal long sought in Africa.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2023
Healthcare
Driving growth in Africa’s healthcare sector is the increasing size of Africa’s middle class, which in turn is motivated by health awareness from campaigns mounted by partnerships of the UN, NGOs and local governments. Private hospitals are proliferating continent-wide, offering improved service to the increasing number of patients who can afford them. Healthcare is one of the most vibrant focuses of technology companies, with resulting cost reductions benefitting patients and creating greater efficiencies, raising the profits of investors.
Among Pan-African healthcare providers in 2025, African Medical Investments, which operates private hospitals in Dar es Salaam, Harare and Maputo, plans to expand into other East African countries and Nigeria. In Kenya’s tech hub, Nairobi’s healthcare technologists are investing in the use of AI and the internet to treat patients remotely and stage patient interactions with healthcare personnel, using teleconferencing systems, which will make their appearances in 2025.
Infrastructure
Investment in infrastructure is as varied as the types of infrastructure. However, the majority of investment in this field is in telecommunications, transportation and utilities like water and waste management. Improvement in infrastructure of any kind provides the foundation for broad economic growth as people in 2025 will have more options to communicate, travel and enjoy reliable water supplies. Urban development, particularly housing, is tied to road, water and waste management infrastructure. While urban infrastructure like roads and utilities are state financed, housing is largely a private sector undertaking.
Such investment requires significant capital but offers substantial returns for investment because it supports the unending need for all forms of infrastructure to be persistently maintained and improved. In 2025, key infrastructure developments will include the start of construction on Kenya and Ethiopia’s rail link, costing US$14 billion, the final master plan of South Africa’s light rail Gautrain and the start of Morocco’s light rail system’s expansion to Marrakech, which will cost US$9 billion. The African Development Bank’s African Water Facility will be mobilising US$320 million to finance 50 sanitation projects, benefitting 15 million Africans in the urban areas of 52 countries, and which is forecast to generate US$ 7 billion in downstream investment.

UN Trade and Development, 2024
The critical points:
- Investment in energy and agriculture are founded on natural resources already abundantly available throughout Africa, which require capital to exploit
- Africa’s growing middle class is fuelling investment growth in all economic sectors but particularly in private healthcare
- Though requiring massive amounts of capital, large infrastructure projects generate significant returns on investment, laying the foundation for larger economic growth