On 27 February 2026, the African Development Bank’s board of directors approved a €6.5 million investment in Saviu II, the second fund of Abidjan-headquartered Saviu Ventures. It is the largest single DFI commitment to a Francophone-Africa-focused venture capital fund to date, and it carries a structural signal that goes well beyond the cheque: development finance has concluded that Francophone Africa’s tech ecosystem is ready to be treated as an investable asset class.
The Investment
The AfDB’s €6.5 million ticket — approximately $7.6 million at current rates — is structured as a blended finance instrument. €4.5 million comes directly from the Bank’s own balance sheet as equity; the remaining €2 million is a first-loss tranche deployed on behalf of the European Commission under the Boost Africa Programme, a joint AfDB-European Investment Bank initiative. The first-loss capital functions as a risk absorber: by absorbing downside before commercial LPs take losses, it is designed to crowd in private capital that would not otherwise enter the fund.
The AfDB frames the investment as targeting the structural funding gap at seed and early institutional stage in Francophone West and Central Africa — a market of more than 200 million people that has historically received less than 10% of total African VC disbursements despite representing a significant share of the continent’s population and GDP.
What the AfDB Anchor Means for the Fund
Saviu II’s fundraising trajectory illustrates the cumulative logic of institutional endorsement. The fund reached its first close at €12 million in November 2023, drawing from European and African family offices, entrepreneurs, and high-net-worth individuals. By early 2025, a second close brought in three institutional LPs — Proparco (the French development finance institution), the Dutch Good Growth Fund (DGGF) via Triple Jump, and AXIAN Investment — lifting the fund to approximately €25 million and marking the moment when DFI capital first entered the cap table.
When that second close was announced, Benoit Delestre, Saviu Ventures’ managing partner, described what institutional backing meant to the fund’s strategy: “We are grateful to welcome our first institutional investors as well as a new strategic investor. Their involvement not only validates our investment approach in Francophone Africa but also strengthens our ability to deliver greater value to our portfolio, by fostering impactful connections with corporate partners and international organisations.”
His co-managing partner, Samuel Touboul, was equally direct about what that milestone represented for Francophone Africa VC more broadly: “This first support of institutional investors to our funds and strategy demonstrates that Saviu Ventures now counts as one of the few leading venture capital funds in the region, operating and investing with the highest standards.”
The AfDB commitment, approved fourteen months later and at nearly twice the size of any single prior DFI commitment to the fund, is the continuation of that legitimation logic — now with the continent’s most significant multilateral development bank as an endorsing LP. Saviu II is targeting a €30–50 million final close; the AfDB’s entry positions the fund to cross the €30 million threshold and begin approaching institutional scale.
Proparco’s Head of Venture Capital, Fabrice Perez, noted when his institution joined in 2025: “We are absolutely delighted to invest in Saviu Ventures, alongside our trusted partners, DGGF and Axian, to further our commitment to innovative African startups.” The AfDB’s approval follows that coalition logic but raises the ceiling — the Bank’s participation is a signal to any remaining commercial LPs that the fund has passed the highest institutional bar available on the continent.
The Track Record Behind the Mandate
Saviu was founded in 2018 to address a structural problem: Francophone Africa — spanning Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Cameroon, Mali, DRC, and the broader West and Central African ecosystem — was producing technology companies but lacked local early-stage capital. The firm’s founding thesis held that founders in these markets needed investors who could operate in French, understood Francophone regulatory regimes, and had existing relationships with the government institutions and distribution networks that determine whether a startup scales or stalls.
Fund I, a €10 million vehicle closed across 12 companies, has since returned two exits. Lapaire, the eyewear retail chain that expanded across Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, and Togo, was sold to Creadev — the family office of the Mulliez dynasty — in January 2025. Kamtar, a logistics company, was acquired by Logidoo in October 2025. Two exits from a €10 million fund in a market that most institutional capital had written off as uninvestable is precisely the evidence base that DFIs require before writing their first cheques.
Fund II’s portfolio now spans more than 20 companies across fintech, healthtech, agritech, and logistics, with 83% of capital deployed in Francophone markets. Portfolio companies include Julaya, the Ivorian B2B neobank; Waspito, a Cameroonian healthtech platform; and Workpay, a Kenyan HR and payroll company that has expanded its payroll and workforce management platform into Francophone markets including Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon, representing Saviu’s cross-market ambitions. Techpoint Africa described the firm’s approach as follows: “While most VCs chase billion-dollar unicorns, Saviu Ventures focuses on early, realistic exits in Francophone Africa.”
The Broader Capital Stack
The AfDB investment does not exist in isolation. It coincides with a set of regulatory shifts across West Africa that are beginning to create the institutional LP base that Francophone VC has always lacked. Ghana’s National Pensions Regulatory Authority issued a directive in May 2025 requiring pension funds to allocate a minimum of 5% of assets to domestic private equity and venture capital by 2026 — making Ghana the first African country to mandate (rather than merely permit) pension investment in VC. Ghana’s pension assets stood at GH¢78.2 billion (approximately $6.2 billion) as of mid-2024; a 5% allocation would release roughly $310 million in domestic institutional capital into the asset class.
For Saviu, this matters less for Saviu II — which is already in its final close phase — than for what it signals about the LP landscape for any successor fund. The structural constraint on Francophone Africa VC has always been a gap between DFI and family office capital on one side and the absence of African institutional LPs on the other. A mandatory pension allocation in Ghana, and the possibility that Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, or Senegal follow similar regulatory paths, would change that calculus materially.
What Comes Next
The AfDB’s involvement marks a turning point in how Saviu II will be perceived in its final close phase. Development finance anchor positions are not passive — they bring co-investment pipelines, development mandate alignment, and the institutional reputational weight that opens doors with pension funds, sovereign wealth vehicles, and commercial LPs who require multilateral validation before committing to an emerging market fund manager.
For Francophone Africa as an investment geography, the implications run deeper. The AfDB’s choice to commit €6.5 million to a Francophone-specific VC fund — under a new Bank president, Sidi Ould Tah, who took office in September 2024 — signals that the institution’s capital allocation is beginning to match its long-standing rhetorical commitment to balanced continental development. Whether other DFIs and multilateral institutions follow matters: Francophone Africa has the founders, the markets, and now the exits. What it has lacked is the sustained institutional endorsement that turns an underfunded opportunity into a recognised asset class. The AfDB’s February 2026 board approval is a concrete step toward that recognition.
— Kwame Asante, Business Reporter, BETAR.africa
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