The Week in impact investing: Flipping the script

TGIF, Agents of Impact! 

In today’s Brief:

• Roundup: Driving impact to create value and lower costs
• Podcasts: Mark Campanale, Wilson Lester, Elizabeth Howard, along with Dennis Price and Amy Cortese on the ImpactAlpha Podcast Network 
• Agent of Impact: Afrishela’s Jane Muia on underwriting with a gender lens (video)

🗣 Levelized cost of impact. Perhaps it was the calm precision with which Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as Lula, dispatched with US President Donald Trump’s retrograde rant against renewable energy in his bizarre address to the United Nations, as Erik Stein and I reported. Perhaps it was the accelerating global adoption of cheap and abundant wind and solar energy, fueled by low-cost Chinese imports, that is outracing the US abandonment of climate leadership, as Carbon Tracker’s Mark Campanale told Amy Cortese. Perhaps it was the dogged persistence of so many Agents of Impact, on bright display at Climate Week NYC, “to chart a path forward to bring the benefits of clean technologies to communities across the country,” as Climate United’s Beth Bafford told Amy. Or all that and more. “The conversation has shifted,” declared Galvanize’s Tom Steyer in a dispatch from New York. “This week, it’s not whether change will happen, but how fast and how big.”

The core of Steyer’s argument is that solar (and wind), bolstered by batteries, now often represents the lowest levelized cost of energy, or LCOE, in a world with insatiable energy demand. Other green technologies are on a similar cost curve, as ImpactAlpha’s Lucy Ngige detailed in her report of Mash Make’s commercialization path from low-carbon biofuel to massively carbon-negative biochar, with dramatic improvements in soil health along the way. “We have a product that creates a crazy amount of value for the farmers,” Mash Makes’ Jakob Bejbro Andersen told Lucy. Fund managers are putting a gender lens on climate investments, Heading for Change’s Sana Kapadia and Rachel Hills reported, “to design products that work, to identify markets that others miss, and to build companies more likely to scale and endure.” The vibrant climate tech landscape in Latin America and the Caribbean offers investors, whispered Reciprocal’s Benjamin Zehr, “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to access high-impact technologies at earlier stages and lower valuations than in saturated markets.” With each dollar for climate adaptation and resilience delivering about $10 in benefits, Prime Coalition’s Keri Browder laid out frameworks for assessing such “A&R” investments.

The increasingly attractive “levelized cost of impact” (LCOI, anyone?) likewise flips the script even for GPs who hesitate to call themselves “impact” fund managers. “Smart managers are leaning into impact strategies, not as a brand, but as a driver of value,” Dennis Price wrote from the Frame gathering in London. As Holistic Impact’s Cecile Blilious told Dennis, “The label ‘impact’ isn’t always necessary. What matters is the application of impact and weaving it into the product, as it creates significant business advantages.” Shared prosperity can be as powerful as technology innovation. At Founders First, Kim Folsom is measuring the wealth created among the entrepreneurs Founders First supports. “This is how families achieve stability across generations and how communities break cycles of poverty,” Folsom wrote. “Wealth creation is not just a financial milestone. It is a structural change agent.” – David Bank

Sponsored by UNICEF Venture Fund

The rise of femtech in emerging markets. India-based CareNX’s Fetosense app is using AI and smartphones to reduce the likelihood of stillbirths by making fetal monitoring accessible to expecting mothers anywhere. A new wave of startups with innovative products and services designed specifically for women and girls is transforming lives in emerging markets, UNICEF Venture Fund’s Sanna Bedi writes in a guest post on ImpactAlpha.

• Open call. “When innovators design with women and girls in mind, they unlock solutions that improve health outcomes, strengthen financial agency and create safer, more inclusive communities,” Bedi writes. The UNICEF Venture Fund’s open call for innovations has attracted more than 1,100 femtech submissions from 85 countries.
  
• Keep reading, “The rise of femtech in emerging markets,” by Sanna Bedi of UNICEF Venture Fund.

The Week’s Podcasts

🎧 This Week in Impact. Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with Amy Cortese and Dennis Price. Up this week: How investors at Climate Week NYC shook off the Trump doldrums. And how, from Singapore to London, even fund managers that shun the impact label are driving alpha with impact. Listen to the new episode of This Week in Impact. Get the podcast in your feed by subscribing on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.

🦸 Agents of Impact: Carbon Tracker’s Mark Campanale on the strange split screen at Climate Week NYC. The Trump administration is strong-arming foreign nations into buying US gas and weakening climate policies. “The Europeans are not buying it,” Carbon Tracker’s Mark Campanale said on the latest Agents of Impact podcast. Nor are Asian countries. “The ones today who are taking sustainability more seriously than anyone else are the Chinese, the Koreans, the Singaporeans and groups in Indonesia, Malaysia,” he said. “It’s Asia, led by groups like Temasek, who are taking sustainability very, very seriously.” Read on and listen in.

🏘️ Community Capital Live: Unlocking ownership for Main Street entrepreneurs with Wilson Lester. Partners in Equity’s Wilson Lester joins Joel Skene to talk about how shared equity and downpayment assistance helps businesses acquire the commercial real estate where they operate. Says Lester: “We want to put the entrepreneur in a position of power and to be self-sufficient without needing a partner.” Watch the conversation, and RSVP for the next Community Capital Live, Wednesday, Oct. 8.

📯 The Criterion Institute Podcast: Rethinking local capital mobilization in Africa. Host Joy Anderson chats with Lelapa’s Elizabeth Howard about the challenges faced by female fund managers, the importance of local capital mobilization in Africa, and the need to adapt financing models and investment strategies for local contexts. Listen to the latest episode.

The Week’s Agent of Impact

Afrishela’s Jane Muia: Underwriting with a gender lens in Africa (video). Jane Muia remembers a loan that helped a woman who runs a sweet potato farm in Kenya nearly triple her yield per acre. “That allows the business to have increased incomes and improved livelihoods, which is exactly what we’re looking for,” Muia told ImpactAlpha in a video interview. Muia is a senior investment officer at Afrishela, a South African capital provider that makes impact-linked loans and revenue-based financing available to women-owned businesses in East and Southern Africa. Afrishela, managed by the Graça Machel Trust, is looking to raise $30 million and to push other financial institutions to adopt its alternative credit-risk assessment approach to accelerate women’s financial inclusion. 

• Systemic bias. African women face specific obstacles to credit access, including lack of collateral, credit histories and formal land titles, an obstacle that itself stems from the widespread exclusion of women in land inheritance. The Kenyan farmer’s business, for example, was too small to be eligible for a traditional bank loan. “There’s a lot of systemic, unconscious gender bias,” Muia said in the video, part of ImpactAlpha’s Pathways to Growth series with the Collaborative for Frontier Finance. “We are coming in to help bridge that gap with more responsive financing.” Afrishela offers loans of between $20,000 and $500,000 in growth capital, primarily in agriculture, retail, health, education and other sectors with high female participation.
  
• Updated underwriting. The Graça Machel Trust, founded by the former first lady of Mozambique and South Africa and wife of Nelson Mandela, is demonstrating an Alternative Credit Assessment Framework in hopes of closing a yawning financing gap for women-led small businesses in Africa. Afrishela’s underwriting considers alternative forms of collateral, like equipment, future revenues and even cash. And it accounts for women’s better repayment records, on the whole. “Women care about their beneficiaries. They care about the impact of their work. They’re very conscientious,” Muia shared. “We see a widespread impact on the communities that they serve and work.”
  
• Keep reading, and watch the video, “Afrishela’s Jane Muia: Underwriting with a gender lens in Africa,” by Lucy Ngige. See more from the Pathways to Growth video series, in partnership with the Collaborative for Frontier Finance. 

The Week’s Deals, Talent and Jobs

💼 See and share more than a dozen new impact jobs posted this week on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub and view hundreds of more jobs in impact investing and sustainable finance. Have a job listing to post? Submit it here. Catch up on all of this week’s dealflow reporting.

Overture Ventures appointed Julius Genachowski, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and ex-Tesla executive Rohan Patel, as venture partners. The firm also adds four advisors: Google’s Kate Brandt, Dan Brunner of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Venrock’s Ray Rothrock, and Neil Catterjee, former chairman of the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Blueridge Climate Ventures welcomed Jeremy Siegel, former consultant at Boston Consulting Group, as a venture consultant…. O’Shaghnessy Ventures appointed Jean-Marc Daecius as chief of staff… Health Forward Foundation added Anthony Lloyd, previously with Livingston Hill Group, as chief financial officer… Finnfund tapped Otto Ahonen, previously with Deloitte, as an investment analyst… Just Futures PBC promoted Mika Weinstein to CEO, and George Guerrero to chief investment officer.

Allevate Impact Capital tapped Kyle Kotsios as vice president of underwriting and deal structuring for its employee ownership fund… Episcopal Health Foundation promoted CJ Eisenbarth Hager to vice president of grants… LeapFrog Investments added Serhat Aydogdu, previously with Just Climate, as a climate associate director in its London office… AccelR8 Ventures appointed Ryan Macpherson, formerly with Autodesk, as a partner. 

Lilian Dodd, previously with the Environmental Defense Fund, joined Ownership Works as a manager on the nonprofit’s client advisory services team… WaterEquity promoted Suma Swaminathan to head of private equity… Media Development Investment Fund appointed Nolwazi Tusini as Southern Africa program director, and Adedeji Adekunle as West and East Africa program director…  Yici Wang was promoted to manager of impact investments at CapShift.

Bluefront Equity welcomed Maria Benedicte Færevaag, previously with Norne Securities, as an investment associate… LISC’s Detroit division added Linda Nosegbe of the Gilbert Family Foundation to its local advisory committee… Leo Peyronnin, previously with Omidyar Network, joined Zeal Capital Partners as an associate.

That’s a wrap. Have a wonderful weekend. 

 – Sept. 26, 2025