The Week in impact investing: Incompletely transparent

TGIF, Agents of Impact! 

💃🏽 Step up, step out. If you’re in the Bay Area this weekend, join ImpactAlpha at San Francisco’s lively Cigar Bar and enjoy the jazz and soul sounds of Morgan Simon and Iya Lingua and impact networking with Candide Group, Toniic, ImpactAssets, Echoing Green, Confluence Philanthropy and the SF Impact Crew, Sunday, Nov. 16, from 4-8pm PT. Admission is free, but please RSVP here.

📞 PluggedIn: LabStart’s blueprint for climate tech founders. What does it take to graduate breakthrough climate technologies from university labs to venture-ready startups? LabStart’s Troy Daley will share how the incubator nurtures first-time founders; what the federal government gets right (and wrong) about tech transfer; and the climate solutions for the 2030s already on the pathway from research to real-world application, in conversation with ImpactAlpha contributor Sherrell Dorsey, Tuesday, Nov. 18, at 10am PT / 1pm ET. RSVP today.

In today’s Brief:

• Roundup: Transparency and behavior change
• Podcasts: This Week in Impact, Community Capital Live and Criterion Institute
• Calls: Financing growth firms in Africa and braiding capital for climate startups 

🗣 Under the hood. It didn’t take long for critics, including from his own party, to dissect President Donald Trump’s call for a 50-year mortgage as a way to make home ownership more affordable. “In debt forever, in debt for life!” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green wrote on X. “You will own nothing and you will like it,” was how Rep. Thomas Massie characterized the proposal. But many alternative home-ownership schemes are at least as usurious, and assessing their consequences is far from simple. Even the appealing notion of “shared appreciation” has developed a bad odor, with many approaches tilted more toward investors than homeowners. A number of promising solutions do appear to go beyond immediate affordability to provide meaningful wealth-creation opportunities for lower- and middle-income homebuyers, as Roodgally Senatus and I reported. To distinguish them, we coined a new designation: “fair share appreciation.”

Skepticism and dogged pursuit of reliable data are useful characteristics across the investment landscape, sustainable and climate finance included. The UK-based nonprofit Publish What You Fund painstakingly tallied nearly 4,700 climate deals by 11 multilateral banks, but came up $54 billion short of the $307 billion the banks said they had invested in climate initiatives in the same time period. The missing projects are essentially untraceable, Publish What You Fund’s Gary Forster told Jessica Pothering, making it impossible to know whether they are successes, failures or frauds. Climate commitments at the COP30 climate summit underway in Brazil, dubbed “the implementation COP,” deserve similar scrutiny. “If ambition is to mean anything, we must stop counting promises and start funding proof,” Tamer El-Raghy of the Acumen Resilient Agriculture Fund wrote in a guest post. Jon Tong and Frank Martin of the law firm Cole-Frieman & Mallon argued for registered “benefit funds” to drive accountability for impact, not least because the structure creates the ability of limited partners to sue if they believe a benefit fund manager has failed to balance public benefit, stakeholder impact and financial interests.

The positive case is that greater transparency, disclosure and accountability builds the trust needed to mobilize additional capital. ImpactAlpha contributor Gilberto Lima reported on Mútua in Brazil, which is using AI to map the country’s impact opportunities and provide investors with “decision-grade intelligence.” Also in Brazil, Ricardo Ramos of Aliança pelo Impacto called on the COP’s host country to invest in storytelling, data transparency, and performance metrics. ImpactAlpha’s Erik Stein reported on S2G Investment’s first annual report since spinning out from Lukas Walton’s Builders Vision, which tallied up water savings, waste reduction and other impacts from its more than 100 portfolio companies. “Near-term, company-level results ladder up to broader system change,” S2G’s Heather McPherson told Erik. An example is last month’s report from S&P Global Ratings that a reassessment multilateral development banks’ credit risks could free $600 billion to $800 billion in additional development lending. S&P’s revision was based, in part, on the release of more emerging market loan data from the secretive Global Emerging Markets, or GEMs, database. “Once you start to win on transparency,” Publish What You Fund’s Forster said, “more people change their behavior.” – David Bank

The Week’s Podcasts

🎧 This Week in Impact. Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor David Bank. Up this week: Forget 50 year mortgages, there are actual solutions to make homeownership affordable; the case of the missing $54 billion in climate finance; and, highlights from this week’s call on plugging the financing gap for growth businesses in Africa.

• Listen to the new episode of This Week in Impact. Get the podcast in your feed by subscribing on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.

🏘️ Community Capital Live: Non-extractive lending for a regenerative food system. Host Michael Shuman spoke with Ryan Anderson of Steward, an Oregon-based community lending platform that provides loans to small and mid-sized farms and food businesses. Individual lenders can participate with as little as $100, including through Steward’s pooled fund, which offers about 6.5% on a nine-month note. Says Anderson: “We like to say it’s focused on people, the planet and the palate.” Tune in.

📯 The Criterion Institute Podcast: Church, finance and the imagination to act. Host Joy Anderson explores the transformative role churches and faith communities can play in shaping economic systems that reflect their values. Listen in.

The Week’s Calls

Agents of Impact Call: More of the right kind of capital for growth firms in Africa (video). Tech-enabled ventures in healthcare, education, agriculture and financial services are driving economic growth and job creation in Africa. “This segment of the market offers the best, most attractive risk-adjusted returns across the capital stack,” Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes of Lagos-based Aruwa Capital Management said on this week’s Agents of Impact Call on catalyzing capital for “growth funds” financing such “growth firms.” Fund managers from Ghana, Senegal and Nairobi also made the case for backing relatively small, local investment funds. Aruwa, which writes equity checks of $1 million to $3 million, is in the market with its second, gender-focused fund with a goal of $60 million – triple its first fund. “This segment is where we see the demand on the ground,” said Okunbo Rhodes. Its fund and ticket sizes gives Aruwa the ability to cherry pick firms ready to scale, she said. “If someone said I should raise a $500 million fund in Africa tomorrow, I would politely decline.”

• Fit for purpose. More capital is needed to support Africa’s growth firms, but in forms that go beyond what venture capital or large private equity funds can offer. WIC Capital, a gender-focused fund investing in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, makes investments of up to €2 million through a mix of equity and revenue-sharing agreements. “Small business investing is very specific,” said WIC Capital’s Evelyne Dioh Simpa. “It’s different from venture capital, it’s different from private equity. It needs a specific value-creation process.” Technical assistance to help growth firms succeed is one way catalytic investors and philanthropic funders can help fund managers succeed. Said Victor Ndiege of Kenya Climate Ventures, “The value chains and the markets where we are investing are underserved markets and require some kind of managerial support.”
  
• Local capital. African growth fund managers are finding increasing interest from local pension funds and high net-worth investors that understand their markets and the imperative to support such economy-boosting businesses (for background see, “‘Growth fund’ managers are tapping pensions to reshape development finance in Africa”). They also have the ability to invest in local currencies. Mirepa Investment Advisors in Ghana raised the entirety of its first fund, denominated in Ghanaian cedis, from local investors. “Most of our companies here are doing business and earning revenues in the local currency,” said Mirepa’s Enyonam Kakane. The firm is now developing a dollar-denominated second fund to support local businesses that “have the capability to earn in hard currency because they are exporting or have customers paying in foreign currency,” Kakane shared.
  
• Hourglass dilemma. “There is an inherent problem of moving big capital to small deals,” said Drew von Glahn of the Collaborative for Frontier Finance, ImpactAlpha’s partner on The Call. CFF surveyed nearly 100 capital providers for its recent “state of play” report and found large pools of capital can be a poor fit with what’s needed in most African markets. “[Local] capital managers are playing that incredibly important role in the middle of the hourglass. They can take large pools of capital and disperse it,” he said. Local investment managers, he added, have “deep knowledge of what it takes to excel in their local markets.”
  
• Keep reading, “More of the right kind of capital for growth firms in Africa,” and catch the video replay of Agents of Impact Call No. 74. 

PluggedIn: Braiding capital to bridge climate tech’s ‘Valley of Death’ (video). Between promising pilots and profitable is a chasm that continues to swallow even the most innovative climate hardware startups. Investors call it the “valley of death” – the stage after seed funding when capital needs surge, timelines stretch and confidence wavers. In a Plugged In conversation this week, Sherrell Dorsey was joined by Taj Eldridge of Jobs for the Future and investors Edward Jean Louis and Reginald Parker to discuss how “braided” capital and operational discipline can help founders cross that divide. “Hardware always takes longer and costs more than founders expect,” cautioned Jean Louis, founder of Atail Venture Partners and the Monte’s Fam platform. “You might think you need $5 million to reach commercialization, but it’s really $15 million and another 18 months.” The takeaway: investors must underwrite patience, and founders must model reality.

• Unlocking climate tech potential. Eldridge framed braided – or blended – capital as “the intelligent mixing of catalytic, concessionary and return-seeking dollars” to finance climate infrastructure that conventional venture capital cannot yet back. Philanthropic and government funds can absorb early risk; corporate and institutional investors can follow once de-risked projects show traction. “We’re seeing foundations deploy first-loss capital and corporates co-invest for strategic learning,” Jean Louis said. “That’s what’s unlocking these next-generation green energy companies.”
  
• Read the recap and watch the replay. 

The Week’s Dealflow, 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. And catch up on all of this week’s dealflow coverage.

Hana Freymiller, formerly of West Potomac Capital, joined Climate First Bank as senior vice president and director of energy project finance… Steven Meier left the New York City Retirement Systems, where he was chief investment officer… Harry Davies will step down at the end of this year as principal of Ceniarth, the impact family office of Diane Isenberg… Impact Europe welcomed Angela Wiebeck, formerly with Aquila Capital, as CEO, succeeding Roberta Bosurgi… S2G Investments appointed Grant Leslie, previously with FGS Global, as operating partner of government and policy. 

That’s a wrap. Have a wonderful weekend. 

– Nov. 14, 2025