Kasada Capital Management, the Sub-Saharan Africa-focused private equity firm backed by the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), is preparing to enter North Africa with a targeted hotel acquisition in Morocco in H1 2026, according to a report by Bloomberg.
The firm, which operates in partnership with hospitality group Accor, has opened an office in Casablanca as it ramps up efforts to secure its first transaction in the Moroccan market. Kasada is also aiming to close a dedicated Morocco-focused fund by the end of this year.
Morocco welcomed 17.4 million visitors in 2023, overtaking Egypt as Africa’s most visited destination. With the upcoming Africa Cup of Nations in 2025-26 and the FIFA World Cup co-hosting duties in 2030, the Kingdom is poised for further tourism-driven growth.
Kasada launched its debut $500m fund in 2019 and has since built a portfolio spanning 19 hotels across seven African countries. Notable assets include the Cape Grace in South Africa and a series of Pullman-branded properties in key urban centres such as Nairobi, Abidjan and Dakar.
The firm is actively expanding across both budget and luxury segments, capitalising on rising demand fuelled by economic growth, urbanisation and increasing intra-African travel. According to the UN World Tourism Organization, Africa was the world’s second-best performing tourism region in 2024, with international arrivals surpassing pre-Covid levels by 7%.
“The continent is, frankly, enormous but the penetration levels are still fairly low,” said David Damiba, Kasada’s managing partner and co-chief executive officer. “We think that there’s scope to increase the scale of what we’ve built already by a factor of two to three times fairly easily in these markets while being concentrated to take advantage of our scale in core cities.”
