NextBillion - A WDI Publication

I have spent the last six years sitting across the table from both sides of the same familiar equation. On one side are institutional investors with genuine intent to deploy capital into emerging markets. On the other side are entrepreneurs and operators in West Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America who are building fast-growing businesses but struggling to access the funding they need. The capital exists, but the gap persists.

In my experience leading Top Tier Impact, the reason for this gap is almost never risk appetite or return expectations. And it’s not due to the much-discussed “lack of an investable pipeline.”

The Myth of the Deal Flow Problem

According to many funders, a common reason why impact capital does not reach low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) fast enough is that there is a lack of investable deal flow. Yet the pipeline of investable businesses exists. What I see missing is the connective tissue: networks of trusted, embedded practitioners who can surface credible opportunities, do meaningful due diligence, and bridge the enormous information asymmetry between a capital allocator in London or Singapore and a founder in Dakar or Nairobi.

This asymmetry is not just financial. It is mostly relational, cultural and reputational. An investor who has never operated in a country or region cannot easily evaluate a fintech business there. It is difficult to assess from a distance which local regulators are genuinely open to new models, whether a founder’s claimed traction holds up in practice, or which institutional relationships actually influence outcomes. Without someone who knows the answers to these questions and is trusted by both sides, deals either do not happen — or they run into avoidable problems after investment, such as governance breakdowns, unrealistic growth plans, weak reporting and misaligned incentives.

This asymmetry rarely fixes itself. When capital continues to flow through familiar geographies and established intermediaries, high-quality entrepreneurs outside those networks remain systematically harder to discover and fund. That’s why, in my view, the real leverage comes from building these trust networks: the practitioners, connectors and market insiders who know which opportunities are real, which teams can execute, and how to bring the right parties into the same room.

What Trust Networks Actually Do

Trust networks consist of people with direct operating experience whose judgment has been tested over time. They are not simply networks of contacts. They function through repeated interactions, reputation and contextual knowledge: who has actually built in a market, which founders have what it takes to succeed, which investors behave constructively when things go wrong, and which risks matter locally but may not appear in a data room. Because participants put their own credibility behind introductions, these networks themselves become a form of filtering and due diligence. Their mechanics therefore look different from conventional intermediation through bankers, advisers or structured processes. Three patterns stand out.

First, active trust networks surface opportunities that never enter formal sourcing channels. Some of our most compelling deals over the past five years at Top Tier Impact came not from investment banks or pitch competitions but from informal referrals within practitioner communities. Many investable businesses sit outside the channels institutional investors typically use to source deals. An energy transition business in East Africa may never appear in a conventional sourcing pipeline, yet it may be well-known to practitioners who have worked alongside its team for years. The same is true in agricultural finance, where the strongest opportunities are often visible first to people who understand local credit cycles, land structures and cooperatives.

Second, trust networks compress due diligence timelines. When a credible network member with direct market knowledge vouches for an entrepreneur, investors can move faster and more confidently. That referral is a form of pre-validation that no financial model can replicate. In markets where windows close fast and founders have options, speed is a competitive advantage.

Lastly, trust networks create ongoing accountability, as the relationships within them tend to continue beyond the transaction itself. This accountability is often more personal and reputational than contractual, because future access depends on how participants behave over time. That changes the dynamic in ways that reduce post-investment friction considerably. When something goes wrong in a portfolio company (and something always does), having trusted practitioners in the local market who are invested in the outcome is worth more than most contractual protections. They provide an independent read of the deal that neither side can provide about itself objectively.

What Becomes Possible When Trust Infrastructure Works

Wave Mobile Money is one of our clearest examples of what happens when trust infrastructure actually works.

Founded in Senegal in 2018, Wave set out to do something most investors considered untenable: offer mobile money with 1% transaction fees in West Africa, aggressively undercutting Orange and MTN, whose transfer fees were roughly 6–10% at the time. To provide early institutional backing, potential investors such as development finance institutions (DFIs) had to adapt their domain focus.

Historically, DFIs have deep expertise in physical infrastructure (e.g., roads, energy grids, water systems, etc), which is where their risk frameworks were calibrated, their technical assistance teams had experience, and their boards felt comfortable. Digital financial infrastructure is a genuinely different category: intangible, fast-moving, and dependent on user behaviour change rather than engineering specifications. Those differences are important because the risks of digital finance are harder to underwrite with traditional infrastructure frameworks: adoption, distribution, regulation and network effects can matter more than physical asset quality or engineering performance. With a new category comes the need to assess a different set of risks and rewards.

Bridging this gap took more than a compelling model. We were among the advisers on Wave’s €90 million debt round arranged by the International Finance Corporation in 2022, which brought in a syndicate including Symbiotics, Blue Orchard, responsAbility, Lendable, Finnfund and Norfund. The round was significant not just in size but in what it represented: one of the largest institutional debt financings for an African fintech at the time, demonstrating the growing appetite of international lenders to finance digital financial infrastructure in West Africa.

This followed Wave’s landmark 2021 Series A, when the company became francophone Africa’s first unicorn at a $1.7 billion valuation. Today it has millions of users across nine African countries, has launched a full commercial bank in Côte d’Ivoire, and closed a further $137 million debt round in 2025 backed by British International Investment, Finnfund and Norfund.

The value of trust infrastructure in our efforts to help secure debt funding for Wave came from combining local context and trusted introductions with the lenders’ own underwriting processes, so they could assess the opportunity with a fuller picture. As this experience illustrates, trust networks don’t replace due diligence, but they make it more informed and easier to verify.

What Investors Can Do Differently

If you manage capital intended for LMICs — whether at a DFI, an impact fund or a family office — the most useful thing you can do before your next deployment cycle is to audit your network. Not your deal-sourcing pipeline, your actual network.

Ask yourself: Do we have trusted relationships with practitioners who have operated, not just invested, in the markets we are targeting, people who have built or scaled something there and who hold genuine credibility among local founders and regulators?

If the answer is no, that is the gap to close first. Capital without context is not impact investing. It is speculation with good intentions.

However, this is not an argument against financial rigour. It is about recognising that financial rigour alone is insufficient in markets where information is scarce and trust is a real currency. The investors who generate both returns and impact in LMICs don’t rely only on sophisticated financial modelling; they spend years building the relationships that reveal which businesses are primed for growth, and how best to support them.

The Need to Fund Trust Infrastructure

The impact investing community has spent the last decade debating topics like blended finance structures, concessional capital and first-loss tranches. These tools are valuable, but they work best when they sit on top of genuine trust infrastructure. And often, that part of the equation gets no dedicated resource allocation.

That’s why the sector needs to mobilise funding for building, convening and sustaining practitioner communities, and for generating the kind of on-the-ground intelligence that formal due diligence processes were never designed to capture. In markets where information asymmetry is the primary risk factor, these costs would be doing the same work as any other line in the investment budget.

Funding trust infrastructure also means being honest about the limits of what formal analysis can reveal. The gap between global capital and LMIC opportunity is partly a product of overconfidence. Investors assume that sophisticated financial analysis travels. It does not, not without context. The local people who know these markets best are usually not in the room when capital allocation decisions are made. Getting them into that room consistently, and treating trust as essential infrastructure, is the structural fix that makes everything else work.

Alessa Berg is the founder and CEO of Top Tier Impact.

Photo credit: Jacob Wackerhausen