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The Brief

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The Brief | June 25, 2026
The Brief: Zambia looks to small businesses as pathway to inclusive growth 

Greetings, Agents of Impact!  In today’s newsletter: Featured: Shared Prosperity Zambia centers small businesses in its bid for a more inclusive economy. Top-down, …

Today’s brief

Featured: Shared Prosperity

Zambia centers small businesses in its bid for a more inclusive economy. Top-down, bottom-up, public-private. Zambia, a country known for big mining, is turning to small business as a pathway to inclusive growth. Government and private sector leaders are creating strategies to support economic opportunity and ownership through small enterprises. The efforts include a financing initiative backed by the Bank of Zambia; an angel investing network; and a private credit fund tapping Zambia's diaspora community for funding. “When the small business sector grows, that production circulates within the ecosystem and the multiplier effect is much higher,” than any individual sector like mining, says Austin Mwape, the former deputy governor of the state-owned Bank of Zambia. While the landlocked Southern African country has enjoyed decades of growth thanks to its substantial reserves of copper and cobalt, those riches have not been widely shared among Zambia's roughly 23 million people. Many of the largest, most productive mines are owned by foreign companies. "Growth has not been inclusive,” Mwape tells ImpactAlpha on the sidelines of the Africa Impact Summit hosted earlier this month in Lusaka (see, "Demand for critical minerals creates new opportunities to put Africa first").  

Dealflow: Financing Farmers

Kampani lends €1 million to boost productivity for small farmers in Senegal. Brussels-based impact fund Kampani provided a €1 million ($1.2 million) senior unsecured loan to the Union of Community Mutual Institutions for Savings and Credit, or U-IMEC, a rural microfinance network in Senegal that began as a union of savings and credit cooperatives in Senegal. The funding will enable U-IMCEC to help more farmers adopt solar irrigation, processing equipment, water management systems, and other equipment that can boost their productivity and increase climate resilience. The cooperative network will set up a dedicated agricultural portfolio that can make bigger loans and match the seasonal timelines farmers need to pay them back. Since its founding nearly three decades ago, U-IMCEC has expanded to offer financial literacy training, microinsurance products and mobile money solutions. 

Impact Voices: Risk Management

Rethinking currency risk to accelerate African dealmaking. Africa is a continent full of young people, vast natural resources and fast-growing economies and consumer markets. So why is "risk" still the predominant focus for most investors? "Ask why, and the immediate answer might be political risk. Push a little harder, and you get a different response: currency risk," observe Caroline Chinhuru, Sithara Rasheed and Katherine Tang. The three honed their skills as impact investors at Calvert Impact, Artisan Partners, the Rockefeller Foundation and BCG. Now, as Stanford MBA candidates, they are exploring why currency risk in Africa preoccupies a full 86% of fund managers and 64% of limited partners when there are established financial tools to manage that risk. They polled 15 public market managers, private equity investors, and blended-finance specialists. "The most common instinct for investors is to try to hedge their currency risk exposure," they find. But the most common hedge products "can be expensive enough to kill deals before they start. Perfectly good investments therefore get shelved because the currency math feels impossible." 

Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent

Adam Kybird, formerly of Triodos Investment Management, joins Pymwymic as associate partner… Marie Heydenreich joins Triodos Investment Management as fund manager of Hivos-Triodos Fonds… Global Social Impact Investments names Theany Bazet investment director of the firm’s Africa impact investing arm… Akinwumi Adesina will chair Botswana's Diamonds for Development Fund.

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