Investment an increasingly important driver of global growth

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Simon Brown · 16 Oct 2026, 09:00 You can also listen to this podcast on iono.fm here. SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting now with Frank Blackmore, KPMG South Africa lead economist. Frank, always appreciate the early morning time. Your quarterly KPMG Global Economic Geopolitical Outlook has just arrived. Some fascinating reading, particularly where you talk a lot around the changing investment landscape and how investments, rather than consumer spending, are going to become an important driver of global growth and also particularly African growth across the continent. FRANK BLACKMORE: Yes, absolutely. I think a lot of African growth is still consumer driven, but what we’re seeing in other parts of the globe – especially Europe, US, et cetera – is that investment is taking over. I think the point we wanted to make is,. In other words, we can start attracting some of this investment to the continent as well, if we do things right. Read: Standard Bank wants West Africa to rival its SA business When economic growth stops reaching households SIMON BROWN: It’s an important distinction. Just to be clear, this is not that the consumer spending is going away. This is that the investment spending is really picking up. This is a structural shift that’s going to play out slowly over time and can be, to your point, a significant benefit to the continent and ultimately the consumers across the continent. FRANK BLACKMORE: Correct. There are two angles by which it touches the African continent. One is the Just Energy Transition taking place. As you mentioned, this is the global economic and geopolitical outlook – and we started that by saying there are a number of forces buffeting the global economy. Obviously there is the war in the Persian Gulf; we have US-China competition for tech and specifically around AI; we have hybrid warfare – which includes not only the warfare we see in Ukraine and elsewhere, but also cyber attacks run by AI systems, et cetera; critical supply-chain channels, and trying to get resilience through supply chains. And then trade fragmentation. Those are our big kind of geopolitical trends. As I listed them there, there’s not much good in them coming to a lot of the world. But we take a step away and say, well, yes, we do see this massive positive investment trend taking place in data centres, AI, and the surrounding industries, and Africa is well-positioned for two reasons. Read: Zambia turns debt burden into energy investment with AfDB Standard Bank seals R4bn funding deal for Nigeria’s Aradel Energy Africa’s renewable energy transition: Practical groundwork and doors of opportunity Why private capital needs a stronger pipeline of investable projects One, we have a lot of critical minerals still waiting to be discovered, mined, and processed. We have to leverage that advantage. Secondly, Africa is also spending a lot on expanding its energy infrastructure, and your AI game is becoming an energy play. If we can invest in kind of surplus, cheap – in other words, sustainable – types of energy infrastructure throughout Africa, we can start attracting a greater portion of that kind of AI investment spend to Africa. I think that’s the kind of silver lining we had in this report. SIMON BROWN: There’s a real opportunity there, I’m reminded how as a continent we kind of skipped fixed-line telephone and went straight to mobile. It was like, ‘Forget copper in the ground, let’s go to mobile’. And it has benefitted us as a continent – I’m thinking of payments in particular. But in the energy space we’re kind of going to skip the old-school coal and the ageing, creaking infrastructure in Europe and North America, and we can go straight to new transmission, reliable, green energy; we can leapfrog and put that as a big sort of attraction to the process. FRANK BLACKMORE: Correct. Exactly that. I think a lot of African governments may not have the sort of fiscal might to invest in all this stuff themselves, but we’ve also seen with South Africa’s experience that energy can also be a private-sector play, as communications was – which you’ve just mentioned. If you liberalise the market and you control the transmission and the buying and selling of power onto the grid, I think there’ll be a massive investment from the private sector. It may not be located in every economy. Remember, Africa has 54 countries and many of those, nearly half of them, have fewer than 10 million people, which means that your working-age population in those countries is like 2.5 million perhaps, at most. With that type of workforce, you can’t produce a diversified economy, and you have to work in regional types of pools. Read: Critical minerals: The pivotal key to Africa’s industrialisation Infrastructure spend signals a turnaround for the transport sector Government-business partnership moves from fixing SA to growing GDP I think that’s the way anyway that we’re going: the African Continental Free Trade Agreement, the sort of southern, central, northern, and western regional hubs, later expanding sort of continent wide. But in order to do that, there are also a lot of challenges. We have to harmonise policies, we have to work transparently with outside investors in order to gain, so that it’s not only returns going to a few, but rather everybody’s gain. SIMON BROWN: And also part of that, what we have to negotiate – you’ve mentioned it – is the geopolitical situation which has been fundamentally upheaved in the last decade. If you go back to Brexit and Trump’s first term [the situation] has fundamentally changed – and that brings risk, make no mistake about it. It brings opportunity, and we have to balance that and make sure we end up on the on the right side of that equation over the years ahead. FRANK BLACKMORE: Yes, correct. As we said, we have something the rest of the world wants in our mineral resources. We need to be clever in how we leverage that in order to, one, help our continent develop to where we want to get, and second, to create decent wealth for African economies. Read: How geopolitics could shape – or shatter – SA’s ESG trajectory Africa’s mineral strength is wasted if countries don’t work together – new report How South Africa became a mining country again From mining Africa’s minerals to mining talent SIMON BROWN: Yes, it’s those critical minerals. We have them and, as you say, we use them almost as a negotiating tool – not in a negative sense, but as a part of that process. We’ll leave it there. Frank Blackmore, KPMG South Africa lead economist, always appreciate the early morning insights. Google See more of Moneyweb Google News Follow our coverage Newsletters Get news in your inbox Social Media Join the conversation Social media Follow us on our official channels: TAGS: Africa | AI | critical minerals | economic growth | Frank Blackmore | global growth | just energy transition | Power generation AUTHOR PROFILE Simon Brown Follow Mail More articles Talker, investor, trader, photographer, writer, chocolate eater, wine drinker. 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Investment an increasingly important driver of global growth

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