Africa has spent years arguing over its credit scores. On Wednesday, it started issuing its own.
The African Union (AU) launched the Africa Credit Rating Agency in Mauritius, with its headquarters in Port Louis. Leaders first backed the idea in 2018. That makes it nearly a decade in the making.
The road was bumpy. AU leaders renewed their backing in a Nairobi declaration in July 2023.
At the AU summit in Addis Ababa in February 2025, Kenya’s William Ruto said an African agency was “not just an alternative, it is an imperative.” The Africa Credit Rating Agency was meant to open in September 2025. That date slipped by more than a year.
The case for it is easy to follow. African governments say Fitch, Moody’s and S&P judge the continent too harshly. The big three reject that and say they apply the same methods everywhere, Reuters reports.
The numbers explain the anger. The AU says Africa’s yearly external debt service jumped from $61 billion in 2010 to $163 billion in 2024. Reuters notes that in many countries, interest bills now exceed budgets for health and education.
Ghana and Zambia have both argued that downgrades made their debt problems worse. Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu backed an Africa-owned agency in an opinion article earlier this year. He called the gap between perceived and actual risk an “Africa premium.
Now the awkward part. A 2024 Reuters investigation found no evidence of systemic bias in the ratings the big three give African countries. That sits uneasily beside the AU’s central argument.
That does not mean African governments’ frustrations are misplaced. But it suggests the Africa Credit Rating Agency may be trying to solve a different problem from the one most often cited in political speeches.
Its chief architect, Misheck Mutize, has acknowledged as much, Semafor reports. Its main job, he said, is to steer African savings into African assets. Changing how foreign investors see the continent is not the point.
The coverage gap backs that up. Here the Africa Credit Rating Agency has its clearest opening. The AU says 23 African economies have no rating from the big three, leaving governments and companies in those markets with fewer tools to attract international capital.
The African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) incubated the project. It says less than 5% of financial instruments in a market worth about $4 trillion carry a rating at all.
The Africa Credit Rating Agency will rate governments, banks and companies. It is meant to sit beside the big three, offering “a perspective rooted in African data, expertise and realities”, the AU says.
That is a more modest ambition than the rhetoric of “financial sovereignty” often used to promote the project. APRM chief executive Marie-Antoinette Rose Quatre sounds just as measured. She calls it “another opinion in the market place of opinions.
Independence is the sticking point. The agency is meant to be private and self-funded, and African governments will not own it. Yet Semafor reports that no shareholders, chief executive or board have been named. According to an APRM note, it will also need a licence from Mauritius’ financial regulator.
Economist Daouda Sembène, chief executive of AfriCatalyst, puts the test plainly. To win over investors, he says, the Africa Credit Rating Agency must be “independent of the African Union and its member states.”
That is why the first ratings matter more than the launch speeches. The Africa Credit Rating Agency has no track record yet. A well-argued downgrade of a friendly government would tell bond buyers it is not a cheerleader. A run of generous grades would hand the critics their answer.
Building the scorecard took the best part of a decade. Convincing investors to trust it may take even longer.
