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At just 23, American Finn Walker is already running his own investment firm, Heron Partners, which invests in companies listed on African stock exchanges. Jaco Maritz, editor-in-chief of How we made it in Africa, spoke to Walker to find out more.

Topics discussed during the interview include:

• What attracted him to African equities

• Capitalising on misperceptions about the continent

• Why the fund holds a position in Zimbabwe

• How he picks his investments

• Are African stocks riskier than the US market?

Interview summary

Finn Walker was born and raised in the small city of Roanoke, Virginia. His first exposure to African stock markets came in high school, through a student investment group in which members were given money to invest in shares. Researching where to put the money, Walker found a Nigerian bank he wanted to invest in – but the stock wasn’t available on the trading platform the group used.

He went on to study for a bachelor’s degree at the University of Virginia (UVA) in Charlottesville. His interest in Africa led him to spend three months interning at Ghana-based Golden Palm Investments, a venture capital firm that has backed several prominent African startups, including Andela, Flutterwave and Wasoko. While in Accra, he began looking more closely at African stock markets and found several attractive investment opportunities.

“You had very favourable valuations. You had some very fast-growing companies. And not only were they not correlated with each other, but they weren’t correlated with the global equity market in general, which, as an investor, are really the three characteristics you’d love to see. And usually you have to sacrifice one to get the other, but in Africa you really had all of those under one thematic investment,” says Walker.

“If you want to outperform, you have to be a contrarian. But you can’t just be a contrarian – there needs to be something fundamentally sound at the basis of what you are doing,” he says.

He set up Heron Partners in 2023 with initial capital from family members. He was still completing his degree at UVA at the time. For the first two-and-a-half years he took no outside money. He wanted to test the strategy, prove it was viable, and build a track record he could take to investors later on.

After graduating in 2025, Walker moved to London to continue building the fund. “London in a lot of ways is kind of the focal point for business in Anglophone Africa,” he explains. “While it’s uncommon for Kenyans to spend substantial time in Nigeria, for Nigerians to spend substantial time in Zimbabwe, lots of business people around the continent will spend some amount of time of the year in London. So in that way I went there to kind of be able to catch people as they were passing through town.”

Betting on population growth and misperceptions

One of the key reasons Walker is bullish on Africa is the continent’s young and fast-growing population. Africa’s population is projected to reach around 2.5 billion by 2050, up from roughly 1.6 billion today – meaning more than a quarter of humanity will be African. It is also a young continent. The number of working-age people (20 to 64 years) is set to nearly double, from 883 million in 2024 to 1.6 billion in 2050.

“Demographic projections tend to more or less behave the way we expect them to. You can actually model them mathematically as opposed to forecasts about stock market performance or economic growth or other things that we attempt to forecast. So while a lot of the future is uncertain, we can feel pretty confident about the number of people that are going to be living on the African continent. We can feel pretty confident about how old they’re going to be,” Walker says.

“We are going to see a very significant increase in the number of people living in Africa … while the rest of the developed world is figuring out how to manage a rapidly aging population,” he adds.

Heron Partners also seeks to capitalise on misperceptions about the continent. “The world not only inaccurately perceives Africa, but it’s a negative inaccurate perception, which oftentimes leads to persistent mispricings across markets,” he says.

He points, for instance, to the risk of nationalisation – a fear commonly cited by investors. Yet Walker sees no actual trend of listed companies being nationalised in sub-Saharan Africa.

“All investing carries risk, but in Africa you’re disproportionately compensated for risk because of that misperception,” he notes.

Portfolio composition

The fund holds about 30 to 40 investments spread across the continent – including Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Zambia, Rwanda and Tanzania. Exposure is capped at 20% per country or industry and 5% per stock. “It’s more or less an equal-weighted index of companies with high expected-return characteristics,” Walker explains.

Its holdings include several mobile telecoms businesses – Safaricom in Kenya, Airtel Zambia and Sonatel in Senegal – as well as stakes in Dangote Cement in Nigeria and Zimbabwe’s Delta Corporation, a beer and soft-drinks company.

On Zimbabwe – a country many would be fearful to invest in – Walker acknowledges the risks, but points to several factors in its favour: the economy is largely dollarised, so dividends are paid in US dollars; the population is well educated; and the country is rich in mineral resources.

Walker doesn’t regard his portfolio as more vulnerable than markets like the US.

“A lot of investors in the US stock market are taking pretty massive risks that AI ends up being massively world-changing and everything we hope it to be – which it may be. But on the off chance that it isn’t, I don’t necessarily see how the stock market today can keep up with the valuations we’re seeing. One analogy I like to use is that for Heron’s portfolio to see a 40% drawdown, we would need simultaneous total-loss events across multiple countries. We would need countries of 150 million people to wake up one morning and stop buying soft drinks and beer and using their mobile phones. For the United States to see a 40% drawdown, all we need to do is have global stocks revert to their long-term valuation averages.”