This study examines the desirable public debt threshold for African economies and the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth, using secondary data from 1995 to 2019. The analysis employed panel-data threshold regression, and the results indicate that the debt threshold desirable for economic growth ranges from 22% to 85% of GDP, depending on the kind of model employed. Also, the results conclusively show that FDI always has a negative effect on economic growth when the economy operates below the bottom-debt threshold, with the negative FDI coefficient remaining significant across most of the analysis. […]