Roundtable: Connecting Institutional Capital to East African Trade

There is a comfortable story about why global capital doesn't reach East African agriculture: that the risk is too high or the returns too uncertain. At Ubuntu Capital, from experience, we have discovered that the assets are not the problem. The packaging is. The pension funds, insurers and large allocators that hold the world's long-term capital are governed by mandates, credit ratings, minimum ticket sizes and jurisdictional tests that decide what they are allowed to hold. At the moment, East African agricultural trade fails those tests not because it performs badly, but because no one has yet built it into a form those rules recognise.

Our recent white paper, Securitising East African Agricultural Trade for Global Institutional Capital, sets out an example on what that form would look like: an instrument that takes trade the region already does, every day, and packages it into something an institution can actually buy.

This roundtable takes the argument off the page. For one evening in Kampala, we are putting the people who would have to build that instrument in the same room. It is a small round table held under the Chatham House Rule.

16:00 · Arrival & drinks Registration and refreshments.

16:30 · Welcome The evening framed, and the Chatham House Rule set.

16:40 · Opening remarks A word from government on Uganda's appetite for institutional capital.

16:50 · The argument — excluded by packaging, not by risk Ubuntu Capital presents the core of the white paper: why the region's trade is investable, why it isn't yet invested in, and a blueprint of a financial instrument that would close the gap.

17:10 · The roundtable The heart of the evening. A candid, moderated conversation among allocators, principals and government, under the Chatham House Rule, around three questions: what keeps this trade out of an institutional mandate today; what an allocator would need before holding the instrument; and what it would take to make a first issuance real.

18:10 · Where this goes next What we heard, and how the conversation continues beyond the room.

18:25 · Reception Drinks, and Refreshments