If you have spent any time around African land transactions, you will have heard a version of this story: months of negotiation, a term sheet in place, a funder ready to move — and then, deep into due diligence, a competing claim to the land surfaces. Or the signatory never actually had authority to sell. The deal does not fail on price. It fails on a question that should have been answered on day one.
This is why, before we look seriously at valuation, structure or funding logic, we establish — in writing, with evidence — who owns the asset and who has the authority to transact. It sounds basic. It is also the single most common point of failure in real-asset deals across the continent.
Title can be fragmented across family or community interests. Corporate ownership can sit behind layers of holding structures with outdated resolutions. Mandates to sell can be informal, verbal, or simply assumed. None of this is necessarily fraudulent — much of it is the ordinary mess of how land and assets change hands over decades. But it is fatal to a transaction if it is not resolved before capital is engaged.
Our approach is straightforward: request the documents, verify them independently where possible, and flag clearly anything that cannot be confirmed rather than assuming it will sort itself out later. A funder engaging with a DeNovo-screened opportunity should never discover an ownership problem for the first time during their own due diligence — they should already know it has been checked, or know exactly what remains open.
Get ownership and authority right first, and everything that follows — valuation, structuring, negotiation — happens on solid ground. Get it wrong, and no amount of good structuring elsewhere will save the deal.
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