Angola is attracting foreign investment again, including a striking rise in investment outside the oil industry. But how much has actually changed for a company trying to establish and operate a business in the country?
This week, Fernando Lima was joined by two regular panelists: entrepreneur and Angola commentator Claudio Silva and economist Francisco Miguel Paulo to discuss the investment climate, the barriers businesses still face, and whether Angola is building the conditions for sustainable economic diversification.
They also discussed the latest teachers’ strike, Grupo Carrinho’s growing presence in the banking sector, and Angola’s attempt to use international events and celebrities including LeBron James and Will Smith to raise the country’s profile as a tourism destination.
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Investing in Angola: easier to enter, harder to operate
There are signs that Angola is becoming more attractive to foreign capital. Non-oil foreign direct investment reached $971.8 million in the first half of 2026, up 187% from the same period last year and its highest level in 18 years. The figure already exceeds the total recorded for the whole of 2025. But oil and gas still accounted for 82% of total FDI, and overall investment fell 3% as petroleum-sector inflows declined.
The government has also made formal efforts to make investing easier. A reorganisation of investment promotion agency AIPEX this year created a One Stop Center, bringing together representatives of government departments involved in approving investment projects and giving it powers intended to reduce bureaucratic obstacles. The IMF nevertheless said this month that reform momentum had slowed and called for further improvements to the business environment, governance and the conditions for foreign investment.
For Francisco Miguel Paulo, the gap between those reforms and the experience on the ground remains substantial.
“You can open up a company on the internet,” he told the Angola Briefing. The bigger question, he argued, comes afterwards: whether that company can obtain reliable electricity and water, navigate inspections and licences and operate without being weighed down by bureaucracy. He cited companies in industrial areas around Viana that still depend on generators or water brought in by truck.
That distinction — between creating a company and actually running one — goes to the heart of Angola’s investment challenge.
The IMF reached a similar diagnosis in its 2026 Article IV consultation, highlighting continuing problems with access to credit and foreign exchange, business regulation, governance and financial infrastructure.
Claudio Silva approached the issue as an entrepreneur operating businesses in Angola. His concerns included the amount of paperwork still required for relatively basic business procedures, shortcomings in the education system that make it harder to recruit skilled staff, and vulnerabilities in the country’s payments infrastructure.
“Our workforce is not ready to compete at an international level,” he said, arguing that businesses are dealing directly with the consequences of weaknesses in education. He also pointed to the reliance of electronic payments on a relatively fragile telecommunications infrastructure, recalling the disruption caused when Unitel suffered an outage.
Francisco argued that some of the most important reforms are even more fundamental. He highlighted the need for universal identity documentation, formal registration of land and property, better education and vocational training, healthcare and a court system capable of enforcing contracts. Without those foundations, he argued, much economic activity remains difficult to formalise and finance.
There is also a question about what Angola’s improving investment numbers actually represent. Francisco cautioned against treating rising headline FDI as evidence that diversification has been achieved, noting that much of the investment still flows towards oil and minerals. The BNA data behind the latest surge in non-oil FDI identify financial flows rather than the projects and subsectors receiving them, making it difficult to determine exactly what is driving the increase.
The same problem appears in the structure of the domestic economy. Francisco noted that non-oil sectors now make up most of GDP, but argued that headline diversification figures can obscure the nature of employment. Agriculture, for example, accounts for a significant share of economic activity while much of its workforce remains informal.
For foreign investors, therefore, Angola presents two realities at once. The formal framework is becoming easier: company registration has been simplified, investment facilitation institutions have been strengthened and capital is beginning to flow into non-oil sectors at levels not seen for years. But the operating environment still depends on infrastructure, skills, access to finance, reliable public services and predictable administration.
Angola’s next test is not simply attracting another billion dollars of FDI. It is whether that investment can create productive businesses outside the extractive industries — and whether those businesses can operate, expand and employ Angolans once they arrive.
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Teachers’ strike exposes deeper problems in public education
Angola’s teachers began a new series of strikes this month after the National Teachers’ Union, SINPROF, accused the government of failing to implement parts of an agreement reached in January. The first strike period was scheduled to run from 21 September to 15 October, with further stoppages planned later in the academic year.
Career progression has been one of the central disputes. The government says 53,755 education workers are due career updates and that 27,334 cases have already been validated for payment beginning in October. It says it has been implementing the January agreement, while SINPROF has argued that important commitments remain outstanding.
The government and union subsequently reported progress after more than six hours of negotiations, although the decision on whether to lift the strike was left to teachers meeting in assemblies.
For Francisco Paulo, career progression is crucial to understanding why disputes keep recurring. He pointed to teachers recruited in earlier years who, he said, remain on the same career grade despite additional experience and qualifications.
But both panelists argued that the dispute reflects a much wider problem in education.
Claudio Silva said weaknesses in public education are increasingly visible to employers attempting to recruit young Angolans. Families able to afford it often respond by paying for private education or sending children abroad, while lower-income households remain dependent on an overstretched public system.
Francisco pointed to shortages of places as another symptom, arguing that public provision has failed to keep pace with demand. The result, the panelists said, is an increasingly stratified education system in which access to quality schooling depends heavily on a family’s means.
The implications extend beyond schools. If Angola wants to attract investment into manufacturing, services, technology and other labour-intensive sectors, the quality and availability of its workforce will be part of the investment proposition. The education crisis is therefore also an economic competitiveness problem.
Carrinho’s banking expansion puts concentration and regulation in focus
Grupo Carrinho’s rapid expansion through the Angolan economy is increasingly extending into banking.
The group has agreed to acquire Portuguese bank BPI’s 33.35% stake in Banco de Fomento Angola (BFA) in a transaction with fixed components worth €388.5 million, plus a variable component linked to BFA’s dividend. Completion remains subject to regulatory and other approvals.
At the same time, Carrinho’s proposed entry into Banco Keve remains unresolved almost two years after Angola’s competition regulator cleared the transaction. Expansão reports that the BNA still has not formally concluded the process, although the central bank treats the group as having an effective participation for supervisory purposes. The competition regulator had previously identified potential risks arising from Carrinho’s interests across different sectors of the economy.
The BNA has also said it had been informed of the proposed BFA transaction but had not yet received the formal documentation necessary to assess it.
Francisco Paulo noted how dramatically Carrinho’s position has changed in a relatively short period, from a much less prominent company before 2017 to a group with major interests across food, agriculture and finance.
Claudio Silva argued that this is precisely why the banking acquisitions deserve scrutiny. A company operating across agriculture, manufacturing and finance potentially gains significant advantages from controlling financial institutions, he said, particularly because access to credit remains one of the major constraints facing Angolan businesses.
He stressed that there was no evidence of wrongdoing by Grupo Carrinho and that its transactions were being conducted within the legal framework, but questioned the broader implications of allowing large economic groups to develop extensive positions across several sectors.
The regulatory question is therefore bigger than either Keve or BFA: how should Angola encourage the emergence of strong domestic companies without allowing financial and industrial power to become excessively concentrated?
Angola puts celebrities on the tourism map — but can visitors get around the country?
Luanda hosted the UIM E1 electric powerboat championship for the first time on 12–13 September, becoming the competition’s first venue in Southern Africa. Among the visitors were NBA star LeBron James and actor and producer Will Smith, whose respective teams compete in the championship.
The Angolan government explicitly presented the event as part of a strategy to promote tourism, attract private investment and strengthen the international profile of the Visit Angola brand. Smith’s Westbrook Racing team itself carries Visit Angola branding.
James and Smith were also received by President João Lourenço, with discussions covering tourism, cinema and basketball.
Claudio Silva, who has worked extensively in Angola’s hospitality and tourism sector, welcomed the government’s decision to treat tourism as an economic priority but questioned whether high-profile events are being matched by investment in the infrastructure needed to build a functioning tourism industry.
His concern was less about whether celebrity visits generate publicity than about what happens when an ordinary visitor tries to travel outside Luanda.
He pointed to poor roads, unreliable domestic flights and the limited ability to fly internationally directly into regional destinations such as Benguela, Lubango or Namibe. Angola, he argued, is attempting to market attractions that remain difficult and expensive to reach.
“Tourism starts by domestic tourism,” Claudio said, arguing that Angola needs transport, accommodation and other basic infrastructure before international promotion can deliver its full economic potential.
That leaves a familiar challenge. Events such as E1 can put Angola in front of international audiences and associate the country with globally recognised figures. Turning that visibility into a sustainable tourism industry, however, will depend less on who visits Luanda for a weekend than on whether ordinary travellers can reliably explore the rest of the country.
Coming up on the Angola Briefing
We’ll be back on Monday, 28 September to look at privatisation and the new Angolan capitalism: after years of PROPRIV, who owns Angola’s economy, what has really changed, and what does the emergence of powerful domestic groups mean for competition and investment?
Then, on Thursday, 1 October, we turn to the Lobito Corridor and ask who actually stands to benefit from one of Angola’s most important infrastructure and regional trade projects.
And on Monday, 5 October, we’ll look beyond Luanda, examining whether Benguela, Huambo, Lubango and other cities can develop stronger economic centres of their own.
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Thanks for reading, and thanks to Claudio Silva and Francisco Miguel Paulo for joining us this week.
See you on Monday.
