A continent trapped between abundance and paralysis

When I was a child in Cameroon, I learned a strange contradiction at school.

One day, our teacher explained: “Cameroon has an immensely rich subsoil. Oil and gas deposits, cobalt, bauxite, gold, diamonds and iron. Our soils are so fertile that we could feed more than half of Central Africa.”

The next day, the same professor said: “Cameroon is a developing country. We are poor and heavily indebted.”

Even as a child, it didn’t seem very coherent to me. Are we so mediocre and unworthy? How can a country with so much wealth be so poor?

I saw the same contradiction in my village. A man I knew—let’s call him Papa Jonas—owned acres of fertile land. By any reasonable measure, he controlled assets worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yet he lived in a modest house and couldn’t afford to send his children to school.

He wasn’t lazy. He possessed wealth. He simply couldn’t use it.

This is the contradiction that haunts Africa. The continent holds 30 percent of the world’s mineral reserves. 60 percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land, which could feed a large part of the planet. Yet, families like Papa Jonas’s live in what amounts to poverty.

Africa is not poor. Africa is illiquid..

What “illiquid” really means

Liquidity is the ability to convert an asset into cash — quickly and without losing value.

A U.S. Treasury bond is liquid. It can be sold in seconds. You get the market price. A plot of land in a Cameroonian village might be worth $100,000. But if you need the money next week, you have a problem. Finding a buyer takes months. Sell in a hurry, and you’ll lose half the value.

The difference is not in the quantity of value that exists. It is in the ease with which that value can circulate.

Papa Jonas didn’t need more land. He needed a way to turn his land into money. But the system wouldn’t allow it. The land wasn’t registered. No bank would accept it as collateral. His wealth was real. But it was frozen.

This is the hidden reality across Africa. Assets exist. The value is real. But wealth cannot circulate.

How wealth becomes frozen

Most African economies operate with a banking model inherited from the colonial era. Banks take deposits and grant loans. That’s all.

Conversely, in a liquid financial system, assets are constantly moving. A pension fund in California buys bonds in Indonesia. When one leaves, another enters. The market never stops; it is in perpetual motion.

In much of Africa, markets grind to a halt. A government bond may only be traded a few times a year. The IMF has documented this: in advanced economies, bond turnover often exceeds 100 percent annually. In many African markets, it falls below 20 percent.

This difference is not about risk. It’s about architecture.

The same logic applies to minerals. Cameroon has cobalt and oil. But these resources are extracted, exported, and valued in London or New York. The physical wealth leaves the country. The financial wealth never arrives.

How tokenization can help unfreeze wealth

This is where tokenization comes in. Not as a magic bullet, but as a practical tool to unlock trapped value.

Tokenization is the digital representation of an asset on a shared ledger. Instead of a land title sitting idle in a government office, proof of ownership becomes a verifiable, transferable, and divisible digital token.

For Papa Jonas, his land could be divided into small parcels. He could sell a fraction to an investor in another city and use the money for his children. For the cacao farmer, her warehouse receipt would become a token usable as collateral for a loan or sellable to a distant buyer. For the small business, an unpaid invoice would become a digital receivable transferable within days.

Tokenization does not create wealth. It changes the way value moves. It makes assets divisible, ownership transferable, and settlement faster.

Africa’s problem is not a lack of value. It’s a lack of mechanisms to circulate that value.

Tokenization provides one of those mechanisms.

What would a liquid Africa look like?

Imagine an Africa where value circulates freely.

In this fluid Africa, Papa Jonas would have his land registered on a transparent digital system. He could sell a portion to an investor in another city and keep the rest for his children. The land does notwould moveNo. Only the claim on itwould move.

A cocoa farmer would deposit her harvest in a certified warehouse. The warehouse would issue a digital token. She would use this token as collateral for a loan or sell it to a buyer in Europe. She would obtain better prices because she would no longer be forced to sell immediately.

A small business in Douala with a 90-day invoice would convert it into a digital token and sell it at a small discount. The money would arrive within a few days.

But beyond these examples, a liquid Africa would undergo a more profound transformation. Governments and economies would become far less dependent on foreign capital and international financial circuits. Why? Because the wealth lying dormant on the continent—land, natural resources, businesses, real estate—could finally be mobilized locally.

Today, a country like Cameroon borrows on international markets at high rates because its own resources cannot serve as collateral. Through tokenization, a state could tokenize a portion of its mineral resources or infrastructure. The tokens would be sold to citizens, the diaspora, and local pension funds. Capital would be raised domestically, without the need for foreign intermediaries. Dependence on international financial institutions would decrease, and economic sovereignty would increase.

A liquid Africa is one that uses its own wealth to finance its own development. None of this requires magic. It’s about building systems that recognize existing value, make ownership verifiable, and allow for transferability.

The land is there. The minerals are there. The people are there. What’s missing is the infrastructure to circulate this wealth. Tokenization can help build that infrastructure.

The rest is up to us.

Charles Awanda is an expert in blockchain innovation and finance, and CEO of Songhai Labs. He grew up in Cameroon and worked for leading technology companies in the United States before dedicating himself to transforming African financial systems. He is the author of the forthcoming book Tokenizing Africa : Digital Assets, Sovereignty, and the Re-Architecture of Capital.