The main obstacle to financing African SMEs is neither a lack of viable projects nor scarcity of financial resources. The challenge lies in a structural mismatch between traditional collateral requirements and the economic reality of the businesses that need funding. Mortgages, land titles, personal guarantees or sovereign guarantees remain the norm, yet they are out of reach for the majority of SMEs. As a result, significant amounts of capital remain tied up, while the real economy operates below its potential.
Data can play a decisive strategic role in bridging this gap, not as a marginal technological tool, but as a category of economic collateral based on observable, traceable and verifiable activity flows. A company's creditworthiness is increasingly measured not just by what it owns, but by what it demonstrates over time.
From a banking and institutional perspective, data constitutes verifiable intangible capital that reduces information asymmetry between the company and the financier. To ignore data as a mobilisable asset is to maintain a costly paradox: dynamic yet underfunded SMEs facing financial resources that are available but insufficiently deployed.
