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The True Cost of Impact-First Investing
Drawing on one of the first collaborative cost studies of its kind, spanning eight leading impact-first investment organizations managing $197.2 million across 362 investments, this paper challenges one of the sector’s most persistent myths: that impact-first funds are inherently inefficient.
- Categories
- Investing
- Region
- Global
- Tags
- data, impact investing, research
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NiDCOM, Afretrade Launch $500 Billion Diaspora Investment Initiative to Empower African SMEs
The initiative seeks to harness the growing economic influence of Africans in the diaspora to drive investment, entrepreneurship, trade and sustainable development across the continent.
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Proparco Backs Early-Stage Tech Fund in Africa
The investment aims to strengthen early-stage technology financing in Francophone Africa and support startups operating in high-growth digital sectors.
- Categories
- Investing, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Press Release: ResponsAbility Finances Robust International to Strengthen Climate-Smart Agricultural Supply Chains in Emerging Markets
The strategy is structured around three core pillars: climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation, and sustainable production and consumption.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Investing
- Region
- Global
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Understanding Africa’s Broken Climate Finance System: How the Missing Layers in the Capital Stack are Holding the Market Back
Africa needs roughly $277 billion a year in climate finance to meet its 2030 climate goals. Yet as Gagandeep Bakshi at the William Davidson Institute and Santosh Singh at Intellecap explain, with annual flows of $44-50 billion, the gap is considerable — and investors are pulling back just as the need for this funding is growing. Making matters worse, they argue that the problem is not just in the numbers, since beneath these totals, there is a thin layer of capital piling into a handful of companies and countries, while missing layers in the capital stack prevent the emergence of a more balanced market. They explore how this issue is holding investors and entrepreneurs back, and propose a more effective approach.
- Categories
- Energy, Environment, Investing
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Record Sales Highlight Off-Grid Solar’s Critical Role in Electrification
The East Africa region and Nigeria experienced the highest sales, with subsidies and results-based financing (RBF) programmes helping expand affordability and accelerate market expansion, pushing sales of products purchased through pay-as-you-go (PAYGo) up by almost 50%.
- Categories
- Energy, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Arm-Harith Secures $76 Million First Close for Climate Transition Fund
The fund, which targets a final close of $200 million, is designed to mobilise African institutional capital and accelerate investments in energy transition and climate-resilient infrastructure projects across Sub-Saharan Africa.
- Categories
- Environment, Investing
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Financing the Future: How Off-Balance-Sheet Special Purpose Vehicles Could Fund Africa’s Cleantech Transition
Across Africa, founders are tackling some of the world’s most difficult development challenges with cleantech solutions that require significant capital expenditure. But according to Julia Lawson-Johns, and Amar Inamdar at KawiSafi Ventures, beneath this wave of innovation lies a capital architecture that is still too shallow to enable the scale these firms now require. They argue that off-balance-sheet financing via special-purpose vehicles could provide cleantech enterprises with an alternative means of securing upfront liquidity to finance growth, and explore how these vehicles could power Africa’s cleantech transition.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Energy, Finance, Investing, Transportation
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