African private equity funds outperformed U.S. venture capital and are roughly in line with the broad Cambridge Associates emerging markets private equity and venture capital index for the most recent10-year period.

For earlier 10-year periods – for instance, those ending in 2008 to 2010 – African private equity outperformed the 10-year emerging market benchmark.

Except for the most recent periods, African private equity has performed in line with or ahead of Asian and Latin American private equity.

Over 40% of the funds in the African Private Equity and Venture Capital Index beat the broad emerging markets median fund for their vintage year.

The strongest performing sectors within the private equity funds in the African index were IT/telecom, industrial, manufacturing and consumer. Other than the consumer sector, all of these have outperformed their other emerging market peers.

African funds from the older, more mature vintage years (1996 to 1998 and 2002 to 2004) have outperformed African, emerging markets, and developed markets stocks on a Public Market Equivalent (PME) basis.

African funds from the 2005 to 2007 vintages are trailing African and emerging markets stocks to date, but are slightly ahead of developed markets stocks on a PME basis.

Many of the funds in the African benchmark remain early in their lifecycle and are largely unrealised, making comparisons to public markets for more recent vintages less meaningful for now.

A much smaller proportion of African funds are showing a partial or total loss than U.S. venture capital over the vintage years 1995 to 2008.