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The Missing Asset Class: How Aggregated MSMEs Could Unlock the Next Wave of Impact Investing Deal Flow
Despite years of emphasizing the need to reach underserved businesses, the impact investing sector is increasingly focusing on lower-risk opportunities. According to Adanna Chukwuma at CARE, mature companies have drawn the largest increases in impact assets over the past six years, while funding to seed-stage enterprises has contracted — despite multiple financial instruments designed to serve the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in this segment. As she explains, this trend excludes a vast band of businesses with real revenue, real demand and real growth potential: aggregated MSMEs, i.e., individual enterprises that have joined together to contract and borrow as one. She explores the investment opportunity in these MSMEs, and calls for the creation of a new asset class around them, explaining how this could unlock the flow of impact capital to enterprises that remain systemically overlooked.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Investing
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Geospatial Startup NeoGeo Raises $20 Million from Neev II Fund and Aavishkaar Capital in India
"By optimising spatial planning, NeoGeo drives climate mitigation through measurable resource efficiency and carbon abatement, while simultaneously enabling climate-resilient development and adaptation through proactive hazard and vulnerability mapping."
- Categories
- Environment, Investing, Technology
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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Press Release: Scaling up Green Transition in Southern Africa: Climate Fund Managers Reaches First Close of SA-H2 Fund at ZAR 3 Billion
SA-H2 is a blended finance private equity fund focused on the green hydrogen value chain and energy transition in Southern Africa.
- Categories
- Energy, Environment, Investing
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Acumen Closes $58 Million Impact Fund, the First to Drive Climate Adaptation for Smallholder Farmers
The Acumen Resilient Agriculture Fund (ARAF) seeks to build an ecosystem of agribusinesses that improve farmers’ livelihoods and build their resilience to climate change.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Investing
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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The Catch-22 in Global Health Finance: Why Medical Oxygen is the Test Case for Turning Aid into Investment
By most measures, medical oxygen in sub-Saharan Africa isn’t an investable market. As Alex Losneanu and Jason Houdek at Oxygen CoLab explain, providing medical oxygen is capital-intensive and operationally demanding. That means small- and medium-sized oxygen suppliers typically stall out or get absorbed into grant-funded programs instead of becoming commercially viable, and funders conclude that these SMEs are too fragile to justify the investment risk. They argue that this conclusion is wrong, and also self-fulfilling, reinforcing a Catch-22 that exists across global health. They share findings from a supplier mapping project that show how emerging business models are enabling oxygen SMEs to scale, and propose three shifts in how catalytic capital can be designed to support these and other businesses across the global health sector.
- Categories
- Health Care, Investing
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Standard Bank Lands $327.1 Million African Development Bank Investment for SMEs in South Africa
According to Standard Bank, the 2024 facility had been fully utilised by December 2025, supporting 5,425 SMEs across sectors including agriculture.
- Categories
- Investing
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Miller Center Capital Invests in Koolboks to Expand Solar-Powered Cold Storage for Micro-Entrepreneurs in Ghana
The financing will help Koolboks fulfill a large purchase order from a leading multinational FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) company that will distribute solar-powered chest freezers to microfranchise vendors in Ghana.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Learning from the Corporate Playbook: Why NGOs Must Claim a Niche to Survive the Aid Recession
Global aid funding has dropped dramatically in recent years, while private sector funding in low-and middle-income countries has risen sharply. According to social innovations advisor Rajat Ray, this is not a temporary shift but a fundamental restructuring of how global development will be financed. He explores what this new reality means for NGOs and other grant-seeking organizations, arguing that unlocking private capital will require them to adopt the corporate principles of strategic positioning and niche specialization, shifting from broad thematic focus areas to high-impact, technical interventions that target specific needs.
- Categories
- Investing
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