In the third episode of Transformation Compass, the podcast of ISC Paris’s DBA program, host Nabil Ghantous opens with a question that most consulting briefings still treat as rhetorical:
« Is it fair to talk in singular about Africa and African risk, or is this a misleading oversimplification? »
His guest, Geoffrey Coombs — a finance professional with 15 years across emerging-markets M&A, private equity, project finance and DFI, Oxford-educated in African Studies, and the founder of his own entrepreneurial venture on the continent — offers an answer that should reframe how senior leaders think about investment in less-studied markets.
It is an oversimplification. And the cost of that oversimplification is not theoretical.
Coombs’s first move is to push back against the framing of the question itself.
« Africa is many, many different countries, 54 different countries, it’s a whole plethora of different economic and political and environmental contexts in which we operate. »
The risk profile of an infrastructure project in Senegal has very little to do with a fintech investment in Kenya, or a private-equity deal in Egypt. Treating them under a single label — « African risk » — is a category error that practitioners learn to discard early. Investors who don’t, lose opportunities they don’t even know they were eligible for.
Coombs is direct on the consequence:
« You need to do your homework if you want to operate in this region. And if you don’t, then you’ll miss opportunities as an investor, and the competition will eat you for breakfast. »
The sentence is glib by design. The point underneath is not. The cost of treating a continent as a country is paid in deal flow lost to investors who do the granular work.
The data point that surprises most senior leaders when they first hear it comes from infrastructure debt — one of the most scrutinized asset classes in international finance.
« Debt default levels in these projects in Africa as a continental space were lower than one would see in Europe or in North America, while that being the case, on the other hand, levels of reward or levels of return or interest rates on that debt were higher. So you’re getting higher returns, but the risk, at least on a statistical basis, is lower. So the risk-adjusted interest in investing this space is actually disproportionately favorable towards Africa versus other markets. »
The implication is uncomfortable for any executive whose investment committee filters Africa-related proposals through a perceived-risk overlay that does not match the underlying data. The conventional risk premium is mispriced — and the mispricing has been there long enough that the firms who recognized it are now structurally ahead of those who didn’t.
This is not an argument that risk doesn’t exist in African markets. It is an argument that the risk people imagine and the risk people measure are not the same risk — and that the gap between the two has financial consequences.
When pushed to unpack the actual risks, Coombs offers a framework that any executive operating across borders can use. He describes what amounts to a hierarchy of granularity — an analytical lattice through which any cross-border opportunity should be filtered.
The macro level is what most analysts cover well: geopolitical and economic dynamics, with international scope. Coombs gives the example of Ethiopia, where for over a decade the persistent issue has not been political but monetary — dollar availability and exchange controls.
« Dollar is important because if you have any business counterparty that needs to be paid in dollars, then you need to get access to that money in order to do so. And given that dollars are not so widely available, there’s a queue. »
For an international investor looking to repatriate profits, that queue is the deal — or the breaking of it.
The sector level is the layer most analyses skim — regulatory dynamics within a country, competitive structure, supply-chain configuration. The project or company level is where most field practitioners actually live: management dynamics, ability to execute change, physical location, and the specific security or environmental risks tied to it.
The framework matters less than its insistence: every risk conversation that does not move through these three layers is incomplete. And it is in the second and third layers that less-studied environments quietly punish investors who relied on top-down data.
« You need to try to make judgment calls in a context where there’s higher uncertainty. »
That is the executive skill the episode actually demands — and it is precisely the kind of disciplined judgment that research-grade reasoning builds in senior leaders.
The hardest part of operating in a less-studied environment is not that the data is wrong. It is that the data is thin.
« There are statistics that are out there, for example, but there’s quite a lot of academic work which points to reasons why national statistics, in many contexts, is not as reliable, because it itself relies on fewer data points. »
Coombs’s response is not to abandon analysis. It is to widen what counts as analysis. Qualitative work — understanding stakeholder behaviors, sector dynamics, history of similar deals — becomes as important as the spreadsheet.
He calls the resulting hazards « black signets » — younger cousins of black swans. They do not blow up the business model. They derail timelines, shift commercial dynamics, force pivots that consume capital. They are the residual of operating in environments where less reflection has taken place. They are not unknowable. They are under-studied.
The discipline he advocates for outsiders is not exotic:
« A degree of openness to new experience. Knowing where my strengths are, but also where my weaknesses are. Try to really listen and call upon external advice when I can see that there’s something that I’m not getting. »
It is, in other words, the practice of every senior leader operating outside their home certainty.
The full episode goes further — into the entrepreneurial venture Coombs describes candidly as a failure; into how cross-border practitioners build local fluency over time; and into what conventional finance education tends to skip about operating in genuinely less-studied environments.
For senior leaders whose strategic universe extends beyond the markets they were trained to read, this conversation is a reminder that the most expensive errors are not analytical — they are categorical. The wrong frame quietly closes more deals than the wrong number does.
