The Brief

The Week in impact investing: Remixing and recommitting

ImpactAlpha · June 20, 2025

TGIF, Agents of Impact! 

  • Roundup: Remixing finance for shared prosperity
  • Podcasts: Understanding fundraising in impact investing on Impact(ed)
  • Agent of Impact: Austin Mwape is getting local investors behind Zambia’s small businesses 

🗣 New soundtrack. It’s a five-minute playbook for shared prosperity. ImpactAlpha contributing editor Napoleon Wallace’s remix of Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 classic, “The Revolution Will Not be Televised,” mashes up strategies like Boston Ujima Project’s community-governed impact fund and Apis & Heritage’s employee-led buyouts into an anthem for a movement. “The Reconstruction is not a branding campaign. It’s a blueprint, a battle, a beginning,” Wallace raps in his AI-recovered voice. On YouTube, writer Paul Spinrad points out that “Re:Construction,” as ImpactAlpha has dubbed it, is in fact a bit of branding that could unify the vibrant threads of community capital, regenerative economies, neighborhood economics, inclusive finance and more – “a recognizable term for a new, exciting movement. More mindshare, more credibility, more talent joining in.” As we discuss on this week’s podcast, Re:Construction is about building that future together while recalling the ambitious effort after the US Civil War to establish true multi-racial prosperity, which was broadly successful before a violent backlash. “We’re in a similar moment of crisis, a recession of engagement,” Wallace says. “For that and for Juneteenth, I wanted to pay homage with a remix.”

Agents of Impact are remixing elements of finance from every direction. Even with its $1 billion impact fund, Apollo Global Management, the $785 billion private-equity giant, is not generally considered an impact investor. But Apollo believes “expanding opportunity for workers across our funds’ portfolios is fundamental to value creation,” the firm’s Joanna Reiss told Amy Cortese. Other private-equity firms also are paying more attention to such fundamentals. Slow IPO and M&A activity means they are managing companies for the longer term, as Amy reported with Roodgally Senatus. At the other end of the spectrum, “there is a quiet drumbeat inside philanthropy that recognizes that impact investing is not going far enough, and we need to do impact-first investing,” Jennifer Astone of Collective Action for Just Finance told me. To help such investors, the collective this week identified an impressive cohort of such impact-first funds, dubbed the “Transformative 25.”

The financial structures needed for small businesses and shared prosperity in Africa are getting their own reboot. Jessica Pothering reported on the $200 million Mastercard Foundation Africa Growth Fund’s milestones and missteps as it presses for systemic change in how private capital in Africa is deployed. As Jessica wrote, “Such admissions are rare from a large funder and provide valuable lessons for the foundation and other funders investing in Africa.” From Ghana, Lucy Ngige reported on new funds of funds that are attracting African institutional capital and investing in local enterprises. “I’m looking forward to the numbers beginning to show that the finance ecosystem is being disrupted,” this week’s Agent of Impact, Austin Mwape, said of Zambia’s innovative efforts (see below). 

“The Reconstruction is not a metaphor,” Wallace intones in his own remixed voice. “It is a movement, a method, and it will not be televised, because it is not for show.” – David Bank

Next Week’s Call

Policy action for shared prosperity. Abundant economic opportunity. Uplifted community ecosystems. Access to clean air and water. These opportunities require not only investment capital but effective public policy and incentives. Agents of Impact are working in a challenging environment to advance policies for shared prosperity in Washington, DC, and in the states. Join Opportunity Finance Network’s Dafina Williams, Ceres’ Andrew Collier, EIG’s Catherine Lyons, and the US Impact Investing Alliance’s Fran Seegull to map the new policy landscape, Tuesday, June 24, at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm London. RSVP today.

The Week’s Podcasts

🎧 This Week in Impact: Lessons from Apollo and Mastercard Foundation. Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor David Bank. Up this week: What the $785 billion private equity giant Apollo has learned in the five years since launching its $1 billion impact fund; a look at Africa’s emerging ecosystem for small business financing, from the Mastercard Foundation’s Africa Growth Fund to local African funds of funds; and, to mark this year’s Juneteenth commemoration, contributing editor Napoleon Wallace makes the case for shared prosperity his remix, “The Reconstruction Will Not Be Televised.”

🧑🏽‍🎓 Impact(ed): Understanding fundraising in impact investing. For the finale of season two, DeLia Impact Advisors’ Alicia DeLia joins Lucas and Eric to talk about fundraising in impact investing, investor relations for grants and impact-first investments, and getting capital into the hands of communities. Says DeLia: “A lot of my work morphed from the traditional ‘How do you ask for money? How do you write grants?’ to ‘How do you instill and sustain authentic relationships with wealth holders that don’t feel transactional, and that will resource you for the long term?’” Tune in.

The Week’s Agent of Impact

Austin Mwape: Getting Zambia’s central bank behind growth capital for small businesses (video). Austin Mwape learned the ins and outs of banking as the deputy governor of the Bank of Zambia and chair of both Absa Bank and Stanbic Bank in the country. Now with the Zambia National Advisory Board for Impact Investment, Mwape is working with his former colleagues at the central bank to unlock financing for small businesses while building a more supportive lending ecosystem. Mwape is playing a leading role in the Small Business Growth Initiative, a partnership between the Bank of Zambia and NABII Zambia, the national advisory board for impact investing. SBGI, a fund of funds, will make debt and other investments in lenders, fund managers and microfinance institutions enabling access to affordable financing for small businesses in the country. The central bank is seeding the fund with $200 million in first-loss debt to catalyze other investors to participate. “Over time, we expect this to scale and start impacting the Sustainable Development Goals and other outcomes desired in a meaningful way,” Mwape told ImpactAlpha in a video interview produced in partnership with the Collaborative for Frontier Finance for our series, Pathways to Growth. “We expect job creation to go up and the contribution of this sector to GDP to go up.” 

African pension funds and other institutional investors that have not historically invested in small businesses lack a deep understanding of the small business finance sector. The central bank’s first-loss position in the fund’s short-term debt pool is one way to mitigate perceived risks for such investors. SBGI is also setting up a credit guarantee fund with $175,000 from the Catalytic Capital Consortium to further derisk its investments. The guarantees will cover 40% to 80% of loans to incentivize lenders to take on more small business borrowers and to reduce collateral requirements for the small businesses, Mwape explained.

The fund of funds structure is informed by previous efforts to mobilize commercial capital for Zambia’s small businesses. The Bank of Zambia in 2020 set up a $545 million fund, known as the Targeted Medium-Term Refinancing Facility, to provide credit to both businesses and households reeling from Covid pandemic shutdowns. “Even though that facility was provided, commercial banks did not change their behavior, and the outcomes that [the central bank] was hoping for were not attained,” said Mwape. The new initiative is pairing its financing with a “learning lab” initiative to track loan disbursements and repayments in hopes of making credit more scalable and affordable. “We need to start expanding,” Mwape said. “Expansion is what will generate jobs.”

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. And catch up on all of this week’s dealflow reporting.

Reinvestment Fund added Grace Chang, previously with Umpqua Bank, as a community lending senior underwriter, Kimberly Lundy as chief people officer, Patricia Luna as southeast lending senior director, and Ramon Estevez as a national lending senior underwriter… Keely Anson, formerly with Loamist, joined Autodesk Foundation as an energy and materials investment lead. 

GLIN Impact Capital appointed Hideki Kojima of SHIFT Growth Capital as its growth strategy executive advisor… Ownership Works welcomed Ali Hijazy, previously with research group GEOAI, as a senior associate of data and impact for client advisory services… Ancora added Ashleigh Simpson, previously with Grosvenor and MetLife Investment Management, as chief investment officer.

That’s a wrap. Have a wonderful weekend. 

– June 20, 2025