We propose a toolkit for the assessment of systemic risk buildup in low income countries. We show that, due to non-linearity in the relationship between credit and financial stability, the assessment should be conducted with different tools at different stages of financial development. In particular, when the level of financial depth is low, traditional leading indicators of banking crises have poor predictive performance and the analysis should be based on indicators that account for financial deepening while taking into consideration countries’ structural limits. By using this framework, we provide a preliminary assessment of systemic risk buildup in individual SSA countries. The recent global financial crisis has led researchers and policy makers to dedicate considerable attention to understanding and predicting banking crises. A major finding from this vast research is that, while banking crises can be driven by a variety of different inner causes including a weak macroeconomic environment, contagion, balance-sheet imbalances, limited competition2—they are often preceded by asset and credit booms that, eventually, turn into busts. The critical issue has been, therefore, to identify episodes of excessive credit growth as signals of systemic risk buildup. Empirical research from the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) has shown that this assessment can be undertaken by using the credit-to GDP gap, defined as the difference between the credit-to-GDP ratio and its long-term trend. This indicator has indeed proven to be a valuable leading indicator of systemic banking crises and, as such, has been endorsed as a guide to set the countercyclical capital buffer in Basel III (BCBS, 2010).