How the 2026 SuperReturn Africa Awards are scored: the full methodology
SuperReturn Africa is the continent’s biggest and most senior private capital conference. This year it brings more than 700 senior private market professionals, including 200+ LPs and 350+ GPs, to The Westin, Cape Town, from 1st to 3rd December 2026.
Over three days, its programme spans fundraising, private credit, infrastructure, and tech, AI and venture capital. On the summit day, 1st December, the conference hosts the SuperReturn Africa Awards. The ceremony celebrates the GPs, investors and service providers who have shaped African private markets over the past cycle.
Recognising those firms fairly depends on knowing what they actually did. That is where Stears comes in. Information on African private capital is scattered across company announcements, regulatory filings, fund disclosures and news reports. Stears brings those records together into one structured dataset, used by PE and VC firms, LPs, development finance institutions, investment banks and corporates to track how capital moves across the continent.
This year, Stears is the official data partner for the awards, and our data selects every nominee and winner in the GP and service provider categories. Those categories cover the full private capital cycle.
Six awards recognise fund managers:
Pan-African Fund Manager of the Year
Regional Fund Manager of the Year for North, East, West and Southern Africa
Emerging Manager of the Year
Best VC Fund Manager of the Year
Best Female Fund Manager
Exit of the Year.
One award that recognises a firm that transactions rely on:
Service Provider of the Year
None of these categories is open to nominations. Nobody submits an entry, and no panel weighs up pitches. Instead, every eligible firm is assessed on its recorded activity between 1st January 2025 and 31st August 2026.
Another award, Outstanding Contribution to Private Capital, is decided the traditional way, through nominations reviewed by SuperReturn’s judges. An award decided by data raises a fair question: how exactly are the winners chosen? The rest of this article answers it.
How the 2026 SuperReturn Africa Awards are scored
The method moves in five steps:
the data
the principles
the eligibility rules
the score
and how each category applies it.
At Stears, we are publishing it in full because awards built on data are only as credible as the method behind them. Every step below can be traced back to the underlying records, and every result back to a published source.
The data behind the awards
It all starts with the record: Stears’ reference database of African private capital. The database is updated daily. It covers more than 1,500 fund managers, 1,400 fund vehicles, 9,000 transactions and over 4,500 investor commitments. These are linked to over 10,000 portfolio and target companies and 20,000 people, including their roles and seniority.
Only the part of that record falling inside the assessment window counts towards the awards. Between 1st January 2025 and 31st August 2026, we recorded 1,626 announced transactions and 83 fund closes across 72 managers. In total, 397 managers logged two or more qualifying events.
The completeness of that record matters as much as its size. The investor is named on 96% of transactions in the window, and the target country on 97%. This is what allows managers to be compared fairly across countries, strategies and regions. Activity is measured on its announcement date. Every transaction carries a link to its published source, whether a company announcement, a regulatory filing, a fund disclosure or a news report. A deep, well-sourced record is the starting point. But a fair ranking also depends on how that record is used, which is where the scoring principles come in.
Three principles behind the scoring
Three choices shape every ranking, and each one responds to how African deal data actually looks.
Count activity, not disclosed values: Deal values are made public on only 58% of transactions in the window. Activity itself is recorded on 96% to 100% of them. Ranking managers by deal size would reward those who disclose, not those who perform. A manager that quietly completed ten deals would lose to one that announced the value of two. The scoring therefore counts investments, exits and fund closes. Value is used in only one category, Exit of the Year, where the measure is stated plainly as the largest disclosed exit.
Compare like with like: A venture capital firm writing dozens of early-stage cheques and an infrastructure fund making a handful of large commitments cannot be compared on raw counts. Doing so would hand every award to the most active venture investors. So each manager is ranked only against managers running the same strategy. In the window there were 264 qualifying venture capital managers, 143 in private equity, 111 in private credit and 40 in infrastructure. A manager’s score reflects where it stands within its own group, which keeps all four strategies represented in the results.
Reward fundraising, without making it a gate: A fund close, especially a follow-on fund, is one of the clearest signals a manager can earn. It means investors are committing again to performance they have already seen. But fund closes are rare. Only 72 of the 397 qualifying managers closed a fund in the window. Making fundraising a core component would knock out the other 325 managers rather than rank them. Fundraising is therefore an uplift added on top of the base score, rewarding the managers who raised without penalising those who did not.
Who is eligible?
With the principles set, the next step is deciding which managers enter the field at all. Within the assessment window, a manager must have:
announced at least two qualifying events, whether an investment, an exit or a fund close; and
announced at least one investment into an African-headquartered company, or closed a fund with a stated African mandate.
The two-event threshold filters out one-off appearances in the data. The African test ensures that the managers being ranked are active on the continent, not simply global firms with a single African deal. The awards recognise third-party fiduciary fund managers, the firms that invest on behalf of their LPs. Development finance institutions, sovereign wealth funds, corporate investors and angel networks are important sources of capital in African markets, but they are not eligible for the fund manager categories.
How the score works
Once a manager qualifies, it receives a base score out of 100, plus a fundraising uplift of up to 25 points.
The base score: Deployment (60%) counts the investments a manager announced. Realisation (40%) counts its exits. Each is ranked against managers in the same strategy group, so venture firms compete only with other venture firms.
The fundraising uplift: Closing a follow-on fund earns 15 points and a first-time fund earns 10. Each additional close adds 5, up to 25 points.
How the two parts interact: Take three illustrative managers. Manager A had a strong year with no raise and scores 87. Manager B closed Fund III on a lighter year, which lifts its 63 to 78. Manager C deployed, exited and closed Fund II, taking its 84 to 99. A strong year can win without a raise, but a raise alone does not win.
Ties and verification:Ties are settled on exits, then capital closed, then total investments. The top ten in every category are checked by hand against their published sources before the top three are fixed, so any ranking can be reconstructed.
Stears’ Transparency Independence
A transparent method only matters if the process around it is independent too, so here is how we protect it.
Some of the managers ranked in these categories are Stears customers. Customer status is NOT an input to any criterion. Shortlists are signed off by our Intelligence team, not by anyone on the commercial side. We keep the records behind every ranking. If a manager challenges a result, we can show the inputs that produced it. We would rather say this upfront than answer it afterwards.
What happens next?
With the method set and the data cut off on 31st August 2026, the results are now on their way.
Shortlists for the GP and service provider categories were announced in the week of 19th October 2026. Winners will be revealed at the awards ceremony on 1st December, from 17:45 to 18:15 at The Westin, Cape Town. Only delegates registered with the summit option in their ticket can attend.
The same data, every day
The awards are one use of the data. The records behind them are the same ones Stears clients rely on all year. PE and VC firms, LPs, development finance institutions, investment banks and corporates use Stears to track who is deploying capital, which managers are raising and exiting, and where activity is moving across African markets.
The awards simply apply that record to a new question: who led the market this cycle?
Read more about our partnership with SuperReturn Africa, and we look forward to seeing you in Cape Town.
