A Friend Africa seems to be the catch-word of the investment world over the last few months with the launch of a series of ‘frontier market’ products aiming to tap into investor interest in the region.

Once seen as the preserve of corrupt governments and fledgling markets offering little risk-adjusted return, Africa seems to have found its place in the limelight. it escaped much of the volatility affecting emerging markets over the past year and is increasingly seen itself as a new emerging market in the making.

A number of investment houses have been keen to capitalise on this.

Wealth manager Helvetica is working on an Isle of Man-domiciled, AIM-listed company called the PME African Infrastructure Opportunities fund, which will focus on a range of sectors in 10 African countries, six of them more business-friendly than Greece, it points out. Five of them have investment-grade status from Standard & Poor’s, among them A-rated Botswana, it adds.

Johannesburg-based asset management group STANLIB two Ucits III compliant African equity funds back in July, while Progressive Developing Markets launched the Advance Frontier Markets fund of funds in June, which will focus on Africa and Asia.

Lastly, New Star Asset Management has announced plans to launch a Heart of Africa fund for Citywire AA-rated Jamie Allsopp, which will invest in central African countries including Nigeria and Ghana.

This isn’t a case of providers flying kites to see if the market will adopt these vehicles however; it seems these vehicles will be serving established demand as there is a keen interest among investors for the African continent. For example, Investec Asset Management will limit the size of its Africa ex-South Africa mandates when they reach $1 billion (£500 million) due to high inflows into the funds. It currently has approximately $500 million invested across two Guernsey-domiciled vehicles, one Africa-domiciled fund and a series of segregated mandates.

Do you agree that Africa will emerge from the wilderness of ‘frontier markets’ to become the premier emerging market of tomorrow? Or is the current flood of products playing on market hype and general investor saturation in the Chinese and Indian markets?