Securitising East African Agricultural Trade for Global Institutional Capital

Africa's agricultural economy is widely believed to be short of capital. It is not. Trillions of dollars in pension, insurance, and sovereign wealth funds sit ready to be invested, and East Africa's export trade generates exactly the kind of steady, dollar-earning cash flows those investors seek. Yet almost none of that money reaches the region's farmers and processors. The obstacle is not risk. It is packaging. Institutional investors operate under rules that exclude these assets before anyone assesses their merits — too small, unrated, in the wrong currency, on no standard index. This paper shows how the records the EU now requires of coffee exporters make these assets financeable at institutional scale, and sets out the securitisation instrument that would carry them into global capital markets.