Greetings Agents of Impact!
San Diego Agents of Impact meetup. ImpactAlpha’s Zuleyma Bebell is back in San Diego. Help David Bank, Dennis Price and other Agents of Impact welcome her back to town at our informal happy hour this Thursday, July 17. We’ll start at 5:30pm PT and buy the first few rounds at the Harland Brewing Company at One Paseo in Del Mar. Bring news, views and a friend. Let us know you’re coming.
In today’s Brief:
- Rihanna’s expanded toolkit for women-led ventures in Africa
- Backing small businesses on the Navajo Nation
- New fund for Zambian businesses
- Sustainable real estate for sustainable cities
Featured: Gender Smart
With Gather Ventures, Rihanna expands her toolkit for investing in women-led ventures in Africa. As singer-entrepreneur-cultural icon Rihanna turns her attention to Africa, her Nairobi-based investment fund is deploying a new set of tools to invest in women-led and women-focused enterprises. In the Caribbean, the Clara Lionel Foundation, named after Rihanna’s grandparents, has provided mostly grants for education and climate initiatives. When the foundation launched Gather Ventures in 2022, it added debt, equity, convertible notes and bridge financing on top of grants to meet the needs of entrepreneurs across Africa. Other charitable organizations, responding to cutbacks in official development assistance, also are showing increased willingness to deploy such flexible capital and, more broadly, rethinking capital structures to emphasize women’s ownership and bottom-up wealth building. “We want to figure out ways that, as Africans, we can distribute the assets that are being made from all these investments,” Gather Ventures’ Jo Opot, a veteran of Acumen, tells ImpactAlpha in one of her first interviews since the pop billionaire’s foundation established the $20 million fund. “As this portfolio grows, we want to have templates of what it looks like to do things differently, run by African women who are based here. To have a Black LP, to change the power dynamics that I know exist, is something that needs to happen.”
- Celebrity impact. The emergence of Gather Ventures comes as the growth in other parts of Robyn Rihanna Fenty’s global portfolio have slowed, along with celebrity brands in general. Still, Rihanna ranked No. 35 on this year’s Forbes list of self-made women, with an estimated net worth of $1 billion. Most of her wealth comes from Fenty Beauty, the cosmetics company she co-owns with the French retail giant LVMH. She also owns a stake in the lingerie line Savage x Fenty, which has gained popularity for its body-positive ethos and inclusive size range (its former CEO, Hilary Super, departed for Victoria’s Secret last year). The Clara Lionel Foundation, which reported assets of $52 million in 2023, has backing from global companies including Amazon, American Express, Puma North America, and the Universal Music Group. Prominent figures like Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and rapper Cardi B have also donated. Fenty Beauty collects donations for the foundation, and commits the proceeds from some products.
- Ownership stakes. Opot’s focus on non-grant funding, like debt and equity, is intended to position women as owners and value creators. One company in the portfolio, Kenya-based Giraffe Bioenergy, sources cassava from female farmers for use as feedstock in bioethanol. Gather provided Giraffe Bioenergy with both a grant and a convertible note to process the cassava. If the company becomes profitable, part of Gather’s future stake will be shared to the female farmers in Giraffe’s cassava supply chain. Other companies in the portfolio include Loropio Girls, a high school in northern Kenya. Mobility for Africa provides electric tricycles in rural Zimbabwe. Kenya’s Shambani Pro offers processing services in the mango value chain. In Ethiopia, Kubik recycles plastic waste. “Education is not enough. Income is not enough,” Opot said. “Women still hit a wall, unless we back ideas that have a pathway to assets in a woman’s name.”
- Keep reading, “With Gather Ventures, Rihanna expands her toolkit for investing in women-led ventures in Africa,” by Lucy Ngige.
Dealflow: Catalytic Capital
Change Labs backs its first small business loan on the Navajo Nation. The accelerator and support hub for Navajo and Hopi entrepreneurs has a mandate to deploy $6.7 million in federal funds over two years to mobilize funding for Navajo businesses (for background see, “Change Labs’ entrepreneurship hub opens doors for Navajo businesses”). Its first deal through the Navajo Small Business Credit Initiative, or NSBCI, will support Red House Law, a law practice on the reservation that was started by Navajo attorney Alvina Earnhart. Nonprofit Change Labs guaranteed 80% of a $50,000 loan to Red House Law from First Southwest Bank. “There’s no better investment than Native communities, because that’s where the greatest transformation is,” Change Labs’ Heather Fleming told ImpactAlpha. “The partners that work with us see that future too. They want to be part of that story.”
- Capital multiplier. Change Labs’ $6.7 million is part of a $90 million allocation to the Navajo Nation from the US Treasury Department’s State Small Business Credit Initiative (for background, see “How Kamala Harris helped prepare grassroots lenders for the new wave of green financing”). Funding is being disbursed in tranches. If Change Labs is able to deploy 80% of its $6.7 million by next June, it will unlock an additional $7 million for the organization and more than $20 million for the tribe. “The goal is to deploy $90 million over 10 years,” Fleming explained. NSCBI funding can be disbursed in the form of guarantees, participation loans and venture capital. The program stipulates that over the 10-year term, each dollar in NSBCI funding must unlock $10 from other funders or by recycling loans.
- Attracting lenders. It took nearly a year for Change Labs to finalize its first deal. Many financial institutions are reluctant to lend to borrowers on tribal lands because of legal complexities, particularly tribes’ sovereign immunity from lawsuits and other legal matters (see, “Overcoming obstacles to Navajo entrepreneurship“). Navajo business owners based in cities like Albuquerque or Phoenix have an easier time securing loans, said Fleming. “We’ve lost lenders who were requiring that the tribe waive sovereign immunity. The tribe is definitely not going to give that up.” Others have asked for guarantees of 200%. Fleming hopes the loan to Red House Law will build lender confidence. Change Labs expects to close several additional loans in its pipeline in the coming months.
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British International Investment launches small business finance fund in Zambia. The UK development finance institution’s new Growth Investment Partners Zambia will facilitate financing for the country’s small businesses. BII seeded GIP Zambia with $37.5 million. Zambia’s National Pension Scheme Authority and Swedfund also contributed a combined $32.5 million, bringing GIP Zambia’s anchor capital to $70 million. The partners hope to mobilize $300 million in flexible, local currency financing for 150 small businesses. GIP Zambia is the second growth fund BII has launched in Africa. In 2023, it launched and seeded Growth Investment Partners Ghana, which provides debt and revenue-based finance for businesses needing between $500,000 and $5 million. GIP Zambia will make the same types of investments and is “designed to recycle capital, be self-sustaining in time, and continue to fund small businesses for decades ahead,” BII’s Dirk Holshausen told ImpactAlpha.
- Local capital. Zambia’s private markets are less developed than Ghana’s, but the country’s National Advisory Board for Impact Investing has been championing the build out of market infrastructure to engage commercial banks and local investors in small business finance (see “Getting Zambia’s central bank behind growth capital for small businesses”). GIP Zambia will “channel much-needed patient capital into Zambia’s SMEs – the very backbone of our economy,” said the National Pension Scheme Authority’s Shipango Muteto. Pension funds in Uganda and elsewhere are also financing small business funds as a way to boost their own members (see “Ugandan pension fund is creating new savers with investments in small business and agriculture“). The Zambia pension scheme’s investment in GIP, Muteto said, “is not just an investment; it is an imperative that directly contributes to growing our membership base, thereby strengthening the long-term sustainability of the pension fund and securing the future of our members.”
- More.
Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:
- Bangalore-based Varthana Finance raised 1.6 billion rupees ($18.6 million) from BlueEarth Capital, ResponsAbility and Franklin Templeton Alternative Investments to help India’s low-cost private schools adopt solar and other green energy systems. (YourStory)
- Brooklyn, NY-based Amogy raised $23 million from Korea Development Bank and KDB Silicon Valley to support adoption of ammonia-based power in Asia’s data centers and shipping sector. (TechCrunch)
- Miller Center Capital’s Innovation Fund, a catalytic fund from Santa Clara University, provided a loan to Grupo Merlota, which supports rural Mexicans with small-scale poultry farming. (Miller Center)
- Conduit Capital US, Climate First Bancorp and GreenGen partnered to launch Sustainable Credit Farmers, a mortgage and energy efficiency lender for mid-sized real estate owners in the US. (Climate First Bancorp)
- US food giant Mars will invest $250 million in sustainable agriculture, packaging and ingredients via its new Mars Sustainability Investment Fund. (Mars)
Impact Voices: Sustainable Real Estate
How asset managers can shift real estate toward sustainability. Sustainability has become a competitive imperative for real estate investors. Increasing urban inequality and rapidly intensifying climate risks are intersecting with regulatory mandates, investor expectations and tenant demands, “making environmental and social performance key drivers of asset value, financing and long-term risk,” says Jana Konstantinova of the Switzerland-based nonprofit Sustainable Infrastructure Foundation. Asset managers, she says, are in a unique position to allocate capital toward the sustainable redesign of cities. “The question is no longer whether to integrate ESG but rather how ambitiously to do so,” she writes in a guest post on ImpactAlpha. Shifting from reactive compliance to proactive, standardized innovation can transform sustainability from a burden into a strategic asset.
- Building practice. Konstantinova lays out four strategies to embed sustainability principles into real estate projects: integrate environmental, social and governance factors into investment decisions; elevate stakeholder engagement; establish “ESG labs”; and measure social outcomes. Investors such as Patrizia SE and Allianz Real Estate are embedding ESG into their corporate structures and committing to net-zero targets. The Crown Estate in the UK conducts ongoing tenant satisfaction surveys and integrates feedback into asset strategy and building upgrades. Clarion Housing Group in the UK and CDC Habitat in France use social audits to get feedback from tenants. ESG labs can scale solutions, such as low-waste construction methods, passive heating and cooling, communal spaces, and multi-generational housing designs. Sustainability, says Konstantinova, means “designing for resilience, equity and long-term value-creating assets that not only perform well financially, but also enhance the lives of those who utilize them.”
- Keep reading, “How asset managers can shift real estate toward sustainability,” by Jana Konstantinova.
Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent
Trust Neighborhoods is looking for a managing director and an asset manager for its Mixed-Income Neighborhood Trust work…MEDA is hiring a managing director in Kenya, Senegal or Ghana for the Mastercard Foundation Africa Growth Fund… Army Armstead of Emergent Works, Briane Cornish of Finequity, and Darren Liddell of Vesta among the 20 fellows in Camelback Ventures’ latest cohort tackling challenges in education, health, finance and the future of work.
👉 View (or post) impact investing jobs on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.
Thank you for your impact!
– July 16, 2025
