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High Expectations Require New Approaches: What Africa’s Social Innovators Need to Scale — And Why Support Systems Must Evolve
Social entrepreneurs are tackling some of Africa's biggest development challenges. Yet many struggle to scale beyond their initial promise, despite heightened expectations to deliver both jobs and social impact. And as Amabelle Nwakanma, Akolade Oladipupo, Abdullahi Ibrahim and Chukwuemeka Okeke at LEAP Africa explain, though accelerators, incubators and fellowships have proliferated across the continent to support these innovators, it's unclear if these programs are actually aligned with their current needs. They share insights from a study LEAP Africa conducted, with support from the William Davidson Institute, to better understand where current enterprise support models succeed, and where they fall short.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
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Turning Silos into Synergy: An Inclusive Finance Pilot Provides Lessons for Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration
Silos and fragmentation have slowed progress in inclusive finance for too long, as the efforts of private actors, public institutions, philanthropic funders and other stakeholders are often not intentionally aligned. As Seth Spiro at FINCA and Moustapha Seck at FLUID argue, one reason for this lack of alignment is that many of the systems underpinning inclusive finance were not built for multi-stakeholder collaboration. They explore solutions to these structural constraints, explaining how FINCA’s partnership with FLUID has aligned incentives, learning and execution to overcome organizational silos.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Finance, Investing
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Village Capital Makes First Africa Ecosystem Fund Investments in Ghana
The initiative was created to support startups building solutions around economic mobility and climate resilience in Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Bestseller Supports Regenerative Agriculture in South Africa Through International Fund
The Regenerative Fund for Nature supports projects that are based on local knowledge and existing practices. It was established by Conservation International and Kering in 2021 with Inditex joining in 2023. BESTSELLER is now joining the fund as a partner.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Investing
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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IFC Discloses Proposed $25 Million Investment in Admaius’ Virunga Africa Fund II
The fund is targeting $500 million to invest in mid- to large-cap African companies.
- Categories
- Investing
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Europe’s Textile Future at a Turning Point: New 2030 Circularity Blueprint Aims to Scale Recycling and Unlock Investment Opportunities
This ambitious initiative is designed to support the transformation of the EU textile ecosystem to advance textile-to-textile recycling and drive the transition to a circular economy.
- Categories
- WASH
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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When Competitors Collaborate: How Eight Impact-First Investors Came Together to Confront the Valley of Death
The “Valley of Death” — the gap between early-stage capital and the scale-ready financing that social enterprises need to grow — is a perennial challenge in development finance. But according to Brigit Helms at Miller Center for Global Impact, investors rarely slow down enough to unpack why it persists, and what role they can play in closing it. She discusses the initial findings of a unique collaborative study conducted by eight leading impact investors — organizations that are both peers and competitors — who each contributed individual fund data to identify the cost of maintaining their impact-first models. As Helms argues, this expense is not an inefficiency to optimize away, but rather the true cost of closing the Valley of Death.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
- Tags
- impact investing, research
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BTG Pactual TIG Raises Over $1.2 Billion for Reforestation and Restoration Strategy
The firm’s Latin American billion reforestation and restoration strategy, which includes nature protection organization Conservation International as Impact Advisor, focuses on the conservation, restoration, and planting of deforested and degraded properties.
- Categories
- Environment, Investing
- Region
- Latin America
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