Where Values Meet Investment: Zakari Aliyu Ahmadu and the Making of a Stronger Halal Finance Market
For many investors, choosing where to put their money comes with a question that reaches further than returns: can their financial choices remain true to the principles they live by? In Nigeria, that question has gained greater importance as interest in Islamic finance grows, while access to well-structured Shari’ah-compliant investment solutions continues to develop within a complex financial market.
It is a space that calls for financial knowledge, regulatory understanding and, equally, the ability to explain complicated ideas in terms people can trust and understand.
Zakari Aliyu Ahmadu’s journey into finance has been shaped by education, professional experience and a strong connection to Islamic finance. Earlier in his career, he managed Nigeria’s first Halal pension fund under the Contributory Pension Scheme, the first in the market and today one of the largest within its segment. The experience placed him at the centre of an important development in Nigeria’s financial sector and helped shape the work that followed.
A Certified Islamic Finance Executive (CIFE), Zakari holds an MBA from Ahmadu Bello University and an MPhil in Management from Nile University of Nigeria. He has also completed advanced certifications from the CFA Institute, Yale, the IsDB Institute, IESE University Spain, and the University of Virginia’s Darden School.
Today, he serves as Managing Director and Chief Executive of BAS Financial Services, a SEC-licensed asset management firm in Nigeria focused exclusively on Shari’ah-compliant investment solutions. His work extends into the wider development of the sector through his service on the Nigerian National Halal Economy Strategy Implementation Committee on the access to finance workstream. He also writes regularly on Islamic finance, pensions and the macro forces shaping African capital markets.
At heart, Zakari describes himself as a teacher who ended up in finance, and he has never fully left the classroom. That part of his identity continues to shape the way he approaches his work, bringing together financial knowledge, Islamic finance and a desire to help people understand the forces shaping their financial choices.
What first drew you into finance and business strategy, and what problem did you feel needed to be solved when you began building your career in this field?
I entered finance because I kept running into the same quiet injustice. Millions of Nigerian with strong ethical outlook, in a country of over 200 million people, were excluded from the formal financial system by its very nature centralised around the earning of interest on capital.
They held pension accounts invested in instruments they could not, in conscience, own. They avoided interest-bearing credit and left capital idle. They remitted savings abroad because they could not deploy them meaningfully at home. Or they avoided the system entirely.
That gap between participation and genuine inclusion was the problem that first drew me in. It was not a theoretical interest in markets; it was a practical conviction that finance, properly structured, could restore dignity and choice to people the system had been quietly ignoring.
Strategy became the vehicle because solving a problem of this scale is not a product decision; it is an architectural one, requiring the right regulatory posture, the right institutions, and the patient construction of trust over years.
You have worked across business development, strategy, pensions, asset management and Islamic finance. How have these different experiences shaped the way you now think about building financial solutions that create lasting value for businesses and investors?
Each of those domains taught me something the others could not. Business development taught me that no financial product survives without a clearly identified buyer and a credible distribution story.
Strategy taught me to design around structural forces rather than cyclical ones; markets reward institutions that anticipate the shape of the next decade, not the next quarter. Pensions taught me the discipline of long term thinking: when you manage someone’s retirement, you cannot afford fashionable bets.
Asset management taught me the humility of risk-adjusted returns. Islamic finance tied all of it together because its principles; asset-backing, risk-sharing, the exclusion of excessive leverage and speculation, are a complete framework for building products that endure.
When I design a solution today, I look for the intersection of real economic activity, aligned incentives, regulatory sustainability and genuine client need. If any one of those pillars is missing, the product may sell, but it will not last.
Africa has significant capital needs across agriculture, infrastructure, SMEs and other productive sectors. Where do you see the biggest disconnect today between the capital available and the businesses or projects that genuinely need it?
The disconnect is structural, not cyclical. There is no shortage of capital; Africa receives substantial inflows every year from DFIs, sovereign wealth funds, diaspora remittances, and increasingly from the Gulf and Asia.
The shortage is of bankable, well-structured deal flow at the ticket sizes the real economy actually needs. Most African SMEs need patient, risk-sharing capital in the US$50,000 to US$2 million range.
Most institutional investors are structured to deploy US$10 million and above into instruments with predictable cash flows. The result is a vast middle that nothing is built to serve.
There is also a mismatch of instruments: African businesses need equity, quasi-equity, and asset-backed structures, while the system defaults to short-tenor, collateralised debt.
Closing this gap requires intermediary institutions, asset managers, blended-finance vehicles, and specialist funds that can aggregate demand on one side and translate it into investable product on the other. That is the gap we were built to help close.
Islamic and non-interest finance are gaining greater attention across African markets. What do you believe the industry needs to do differently to move beyond awareness and make these financial models more accessible, practical and commercially relevant?
The industry has spent decades explaining what Islamic finance is, it must now spend the next decade demonstrating what it does.
Three shifts are overdue: First, product authenticity over cosmetic compliance: the market will not forgive a generation of conventional products with Islamic labels; it will reward structures that are genuinely asset-backed and risk-shared.
Second, commercial parity, publicly demonstrated: we need published performance data showing that Shari’ah-compliant funds deliver competitive, risk-adjusted returns because faith sells to the committed; evidence sells to everyone else.
Third, distribution at scale: Islamic finance in Africa remains over-indexed on relationship-driven corporate channels and under-invested in digital retail distribution.
The next phase of growth will be won by institutions that use technology to deliver Shari’ah-compliant products to ordinary savers and small businesses at low cost. The ambition should not be to serve a niche better.
The ambition should be to make non-interest finance a mainstream choice available to anyone, Muslim or otherwise, who wants it.
When businesses struggle to access suitable capital, the problem is often more complicated than simply getting a loan. From your experience, what should entrepreneurs and financial institutions understand about structuring capital around the actual needs and risks of a business?
The most common and most costly mistake I see is treating capital as a one size fits all commodity: any funding will do, but that is far from the actual truth.
The nature of the business determines the nature of the capital it should raise. A fast-growing, cash-flow-negative business funded by short-tenor working-capital debt is a solvency crisis waiting to happen.
An asset-heavy infrastructure project funded by equity alone is destroying returns for its shareholders. Entrepreneurs must learn to think in terms of matching: tenor to cash-flow cycle, instrument to risk profile, cost of capital to margin structure.
Financial institutions, for their part, must stop forcing every client into a single product shelf and start structuring to the business. This is where Islamic finance has a genuine advantage: Musharakah, Mudarabah, Ijarah and Istisna offer a richer toolkit of risk-sharing, asset-linked and project-based structures than the conventional loan-and-collateral model.
Capital that fits the business survives recessions while Capital that is merely available tends to destroy both lender and borrower together.
You have been involved in conversations around blended finance and financing opportunities for SMEs and agriculture. How can investors, development institutions, governments and private-sector players work together more effectively to unlock capital for businesses that traditional financing may overlook?
Blended finance works when each participant does what only they can do. Development institutions should concentrate on first-loss capital and risk guarantees, the catalytic layer that makes a transaction investable for commercial players.
Governments should concentrate on policy, legislation and enabling infrastructure: tax clarity, dispute resolution, land title, credit registries. Commercial investors should concentrate on disciplined deployment and portfolio construction, not on absorbing risks that the market cannot price.
The private-sector originators, asset managers, specialist funds, and platforms should concentrate on structuring and distribution. The failures I have observed almost always come from role confusion: governments trying to pick winners, DFIs crowding out commercial capital with concessional terms, or commercial investors demanding risk-free pricing on fundamentally risky exposures.
What works, consistently, is a clean division of labour organised around a credible intermediary. Africa needs more such intermediaries, more sector-specific blended vehicles, particularly for agriculture, and more honesty about the risks each party is realistically positioned to bear.
Financial inclusion is often discussed in terms of access, but meaningful inclusion also depends on whether people can understand and use financial products effectively. What changes are needed to make Africa’s financial system more accessible while still protecting investors and maintaining sound financial discipline?
Access without understanding is not inclusion, it is exposure. I think the next phase of African financial inclusion must take financial literacy as seriously as it took account opening.
That means three concrete changes. First, product simplification: regulators should insist on plain-language disclosure and standardised comparability for retail products, so that an ordinary saver can tell a good deal from a bad one without a finance degree.
Second, embedded education: fintech platforms, pension administrators and asset managers should treat consumer education as a core cost of doing business, not a CSR afterthought.
Third, proportionate regulation: the discipline of KYC, risk disclosure and suitability testing must be preserved as these protect ordinary investors from products they should not be buying, but calibrated so they do not freeze out the small saver.
In Islamic finance specifically, we have an additional obligation: to ensure that the Shari’ah compliance of a product is explained in terms a layperson can verify, not hidden behind finance jargon nobody really understands..
As financial markets become increasingly exposed to geopolitical, economic and technological disruptions, what qualities do you believe will define resilient financial institutions in Africa over the next five to ten years?
Four qualities will separate the institutions that endure from those that do not. First, structural asset-backing, that is, institutions whose balance sheets are tied to real economic activity will absorb shocks that purely paper-based institutions cannot.
The 2026 US Treasury repricing was a reminder that even the world’s safest paper assets can move violently. Second is operational agility, meaning the ability to adapt products, channels and risk frameworks quickly as conditions change because rigidity, in this environment, is a terminal condition. And third, digital depth; not a mobile app bolted onto a legacy institution, but genuinely digital-native operating models that scale efficiently and serve clients where they actually are.
Lastly , values coherence: institutions whose stated purpose and actual conduct align will build the kind of long-term client trust that becomes a durable competitive moat.
For Islamic finance institutions specifically, there is a fifth: the discipline to resist pressure to compromise on Shari’ah authenticity for short-term growth.
For finance professionals and young leaders entering Islamic finance, asset management and financial strategy today, what skills or ways of thinking will help them remain valuable as the industry becomes more sophisticated and technology-driven?
Build three things in parallel. First, dual fluency, in both conventional finance and Islamic finance. The CFA alone is not enough; the CIFE or AAOIFI qualifications alone are not enough.
The professionals who will shape this industry are those who can sit comfortably in both worlds and translate between them. Second, quantitative literacy with judgment: learn financial modelling, data analysis and, increasingly, how to work alongside AI tools, but anchor every output in the economic question you are trying to answer.
Third, long-form thinking: the capacity to read deeply, write clearly and construct arguments that hold up under scrutiny.
In a world drowning in short-form noise, people who can produce rigorous, well-reasoned work will always be scarce and always be valuable. Beyond skills, cultivate character: patience, intellectual honesty, and a genuine respect for the trust that comes with managing other people’s money.
When you look at the future of African finance, what is the transformation you most want to see, and what role do you believe leaders, institutions and the next generation of finance professionals must play in making that future possible?
The transformation I most want to see is an African financial system that finances its own real economy with its own capital, on terms its own people can access.
Too much of what we call African finance is still intermediated through foreign institutions, denominated in foreign currencies, and priced for foreign risk tolerances. The future I believe in is one where domestic savings, pensions, insurance, retail deposits, diaspora remittances, are mobilised into domestic productive investment through institutions that are African-built, globally standard, and ethically anchored.
Islamic finance has a particular role to play here because its structural logic is exactly suited to this task: asset-backed, risk-sharing, connected to the real economy.
Leaders must build the institutions. Regulators must build the frameworks. The next generation must build the technical depth.
And all of us must build the trust, one honest transaction, one well-managed fund, one well-kept promise at a time. That is how a continent finances its future.
