The institutions that allocate the most capital to African infrastructure have historically had no forum in which to speak candidly. The AAAIR was built to give them that forum.
The information problem
Africa is not short of capital allocators. The continent is short of forums where those allocators can speak candidly to each other. The Africa Finance Corporation closed 2024 with US$14.4bn in total assets [4]. Africa50 has mobilised over US$1bn across power, transport and digital infrastructure [5]. The IFC committed a record US$15.7bn to sub-Saharan Africa in FY2025, of which US$5.3bn flowed to Nigeria, Egypt and South Africa combined [6]. Nigerian pension fund administrators (PFAs) crossed ₦24 trillion in assets under management in April 2025, of which Regulation 1 permits up to 5% in private equity and 5% in infrastructure funds — a theoretical pool of roughly ₦2.4 trillion for alternatives [2,7].
Yet the people who actually move those balances rarely sit in the same room without a stage, a sponsor logo, or a press release at the end. The result is a market that prices risk poorly, recycles the same five deals, and over-relies on one-on-one conversations that never translate into shared market discipline.
Why Chatham House works
The Chatham House Rule, drafted at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1927 and revised most recently in 2002, has one operative sentence: participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker, nor that of any other participant, may be revealed [8]. That single constraint is what makes the rule durable. It removes the incentive to perform and replaces it with the incentive to be useful.
Adapted to capital allocation, the rule produces something Africa's institutional market has never had at scale: a room where a PFA CIO can tell a DFI principal that a particular deal structure is unbankable, without that statement appearing in a trade publication the following week.
What the Lagos Protocol changes
The Alliance for African Alternative Investment Roundtable (AAAIR) is built on what we call the Lagos Protocol — Chatham House adapted to the realities of allocating institutional capital in Nigeria and West Africa. Forty participants maximum. No stages. No slides. No panels. No press. Quarterly cadence. Invitation-only. The convening focuses on four themes across one year: DFI capital and Nigerian alternatives; infrastructure PPP bankability; private credit structuring and pricing; and real estate as an institutional asset class — including REIT and securitisation structures.
The participants confirmed for the inaugural 2026–2027 cycle include senior representatives from IFC, PenCom, the African Development Bank, Chapel Hill Denham, and Stanbic IBTC Pension Managers, compered by Simon Stockley. The composition is deliberate. The room is sized so that every participant either writes cheques or sets the policy under which those cheques are written.
The wider point
The African Development Bank estimates the continent's annual infrastructure financing gap at US$402 billion [3]. Closing even a fraction of that gap requires institutional capital — pension, insurance, sovereign — to move from sovereign bonds and offshore equities into local alternatives. That move will not happen because of a louder conference. It will happen because the people responsible for the decision develop, over time, a shared and honest view of what is actually bankable. That is what AAAIR exists to build.