The African Development Bank has signed a $330,000 technical assistance grant with the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations du Bénin, the country’s deposit and consignment fund, to build its capacity as a capital markets investor and expand financing for small and medium-sized enterprises across West Africa. The agreement, signed in Cotonou on 19 February, targets a structural gap that limits business growth across the region: the near-total dominance of banks in financial intermediation and the shallow pool of long-term capital available to SMEs.
- The grant comes from the Capital Markets Development Trust Fund, a multi-donor facility created in 2019 and backed by Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Sweden. It is administered by the AfDB as part of its African Financial Architecture strategy, which targets the strengthening of local institutional investors continent-wide.
- Under the programme, CDC Benin will overhaul its governance framework, internal policies, and operational procedures. It will also run staff training and build out a structured investment pipeline. The institution is expected to identify at least three investment funds specifically dedicated to SME financing.
- CDC Benin CEO Maryse Lokossou said the support will improve transparency and market credibility, and open co-investment opportunities targeting SMEs, women, and youth entrepreneurs.
Deposit and consignment funds occupy a particular niche in francophone African financial systems: they hold long-term savings, court deposits, and state funds, and are theoretically positioned to channel that capital into patient, productive investments that commercial banks will not touch. In practice, many such institutions across West Africa have operated conservatively, lacking the governance frameworks, deal-sourcing capacity, and risk assessment tools needed to act as active investors. The AfDB grant is explicitly designed to close that gap at CDC Benin, making it a more credible counterpart for private fund managers and international co-investors operating in the BRVM regional market zone.
The Bigger Picture: $330,000 is a modest sum by any development finance measure, but the CMDTF model is not about grant size. It is about institutional transformation: the fund has trained 763 capital markets professionals across 15 countries and launched 13 projects since 2019, mobilising $15 million in total. Each intervention is designed to make a local institution investable and credible enough to attract private capital that dwarfs the original grant. For Benin, a country that has made considerable strides in sovereign sustainable bond issuance, the next step is deepening the domestic investor base. A stronger CDC Benin, able to anchor local fund structures and co-invest alongside regional and international managers, would make that market meaningfully more functional.
Source: African Development Bank
