The Lisa Burke Show: African diaspora in Luxembourg & global finance

There is a moment in the conversation when Cheikh Ndiaye, a fund lawyer at Elvinger Hoss Prussen who was born and raised in Senegal, describes his job in one word: plumbing. He designs the structures that let capital move across borders, legally and at scale. It is an unglamorous metaphor for a profound idea, and it reframes everything the African diaspora in Luxembourg is trying to do.

Around the studio table at RTL City sat four people whose journeys began in Cameroon, Algeria, Mauritania and Senegal, and converged in one of the world’s largest fund centres. Burrel Ngatcha, founder of the African Luxembourg Community (ALC), brought them together. Sonia Brahmi runs a boutique tax advisory firm. Dr. Leila Kamara builds sustainable investment funds. What they share is a conviction that the old story about Africa and money has expired, and that they are the ones positioned to write the new one.

Why a community, not a country

Luxembourg holds roughly 700,000 inhabitants and an outsized share of the world’s investment funds. Ngatcha arrived in 2023, joined Société Générale, and quickly noticed how hard it was to find people who shared a common history. So in May 2025 he launched a LinkedIn group. It has since grown into a network of more than 1,400 professionals.

Crucially, the ALC is not a closed door. Ngatcha is direct about who belongs: the point is not heritage but curiosity about the continent’s dynamics.

The diaspora’s real asset is proximity

Cheikh Ndiaye pushed back on the reflex to equate diaspora capital with remittances. Money sent home, he argued, is love, but it is not leverage. The leverage is something far rarer.

There are people of African origin in Luxembourg structuring funds, running compliance and sitting on management committees who understand both European regulation and the reality back home. That double fluency is the whole game.

The numbers most investors are missing

Ask anyone to picture African investment and they tend to picture risk. Ndiaye offered a corrective that should make any allocator pause: ten of the twenty fastest-growing economies in the world are African. He pointed to Niger growing at around 11 percent a year, precisely the kind of country most European investors would never consider.

His point was not naivety about risk. It was that treating a continent of 54 distinct economies as a single block is itself the error, and that local knowledge is a competitive advantage hiding in plain sight.

Blockchain as a bridge, not a buzzword

Brahmi, who grew up in a third-generation Algerian family in France and now works heavily in crypto and tax, made the case for digital assets as practical infrastructure rather than speculation. Banking access across much of Africa is expensive and slow, and the continent’s many currencies complicate even neighbourly trade. Stablecoins, she argued, lower the friction.

She and Ngatcha recently ran a conference on exactly this, titled Digital Assets Without Borders. Her argument is that transparency, not hype, is the real promise, since transactions on a public ledger can be tracked and proven in ways paper never could.

Sustainability as a financial strategy

Kamara relocated from Paris five years ago, having grown up in Mauritania, and recently founded Kamara Advisory after three years of doctoral research into socially responsible investment. Her conclusion reshaped her career: the real gap is not in avoiding heavy emitters but in financing their transition.

That insight became NZiFund, a Net-Zero Innovation Fund built to channel capital toward green technology and toward the high-emitting companies that most need to change. Her framing rejects the idea that sustainability is a compliance cost.

She is candid that climate finance has a long way to go, a view shared by the wider industry. Private money, she and the table agreed, is still far from where it needs to be, and de-risking it remains the central challenge.

The thread that ties it together

What emerges across these four stories is a single argument made four ways. Identity is something you choose and carry rather than something assigned to you. Africa is plural, not monolithic. And the diaspora’s true value is that it sits inside the machinery of global capital while understanding the ground back home.

At 29, Ngatcha has built that bridge faster than most. As Brahmi put it, watching her younger colleague work, the energy and commitment to bring African voices to a platform is rare. The conversation has moved decisively away from aid and towards ownership, and these are some of the people doing the plumbing.