The Brief

The Week in impact investing: Shared stakes

ImpactAlpha · August 29, 2025

TGIF, Agents of Impact!

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  • Roundup: Risks and rewards
  • Podcasts: This Week in Impact and Money + Meaning
  • Agent of Impact: Bernard Olayo of Hewatele 
  • Pop Impact: Taking on toxins at the Woods Hole Film Festival

🗣 Risks and rewards. Calls for more worker ownership this Labor Day are likely to resonate with employees. They’ll also strike a chord with a growing segment of investors that see sharing risks and rewards more broadly as a source of value creation. The ReNEW Fund, for example, is helping to address the US’s nursing shortage by providing to students zero-interest loans that are forgivable if a graduate completes the program and then works at a ReNEW employer partner for at least three years. The fund is one of nearly two dozen models profiled in “Workforce Realigned,” a new book from Social Finance Institute that showcases innovative ways to fund workforce development that shifts risk and share responsibility, as previewed by Meg Massey and David Socolow. 

Agents of Impact are giving the longstanding “entrepreneurship by acquisition” model an impact remake, by expanding access to diverse entrepreneurs, growing employee ownership, and anchoring businesses in communities, as Roodgally Senatus reported. SAFIs, for “simple agreement for future impact,” designed by Roots of Impact, are a twist on the more common SAFE, giving founders and investors a clearer stake in both impact and upside, reported Jessica Pothering and Erik Stein.

Japanese investors are dialing up impact deal-making in Africa, as Lucy Ngige reported in this week’s LP/GP newsletter. The investments are a sign that Japan’s own growth and resilience is bound up with Africa’s prosperity and stability (Erik highlighted a half dozen Japanese LPs investing in impact funds in emerging markets more broadly). 

Companies that broaden opportunity and include more voices are capturing the upside of wider participation, write Whistle Stop Capital’s Jaylen Spann and As You Sow’s Olivia Knight. Unlike politicians, investors in these public companies have a direct stake in their financial performance. Activist shareholders have brought resolutions asking to end DEI programs at 30 companies, including Apple, John Deere and Costco. Shareholders have shot down nearly all of them. 

As we honor workers in the US this weekend, “let’s commit to sharing with them more of the wealth they help create,” declared ESOP participant Laura Delgado in a personal essay on ImpactAlpha. In today’s markets, shared stakes are fairer. They’re also smarter. – Dennis Price

More must-reads on ImpactAlpha:

Next Week’s Call

🔌 PluggedIn: Funding community power-building for climate action with Harrison Wallace. Community power creates the conditions for inclusive clean energy markets. On the next PluggedIn, host Sherrell Dorsey will speak with Harrison Wallace of the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund to discuss how the organization is helping build support for equitable climate solutions from the bottom up. Plug in Tuesday, Sept. 2 at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm London. RSVP now.

The Week’s Podcasts

🎧 This Week in Impact. Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editors and reporters from our team. Up this week: Jessica Pothering discusses aligning incentives using the new “simple agreement for future impact.” Erik Stein joins from Medellín, Colombia, to share impact investing trends he’s spotted during recent travels in Latin America. And, Jessica shares how a medical oxygen company in East Africa managed to secure financing after a loan from the US’s development finance institution failed to come through (see Agent of Impact, below).

💰 Money + Meaning: Root Capital maps its shift into climate resilience lending for smallholder farmers. “Climate change is making farming riskier and more expensive,” says Elizabeth Teague of Root Capital in a podcast interview with David Bank. “We’re seeing that climate shifts are forcing farmers to invest more just to maintain their past yields.” Teague shares how Root Capital is leaning into its nearly three decades of lending experience to adapt financial tools to farmers’ adaptation needs. The podcast was produced in collaboration with SOCAP and the Sorenson Impact Institute’s Money + Meaning podcast.

The Week’s Agent of Impact

Bernard Olayo, Hewatele: Building a local solution to East Africa’s medical oxygen shortage. When Bernard Olayo finished his medical schooling, he volunteered to practice in a region of Kenya most doctors-in-training would avoid: the southeastern Suba district, a remote, hard-to-reach area near the border with Tanzania. Olayo stayed for three years, managing Suba’s district health system. “I was doing things I wasn’t traditionally trained for,” he tells ImpactAlpha. “I was managing the health system, managing people and seeing how poverty and health interact.” One issue stuck with him: The unavailability of medical staples – specifically oxygen – was costing lives. “Many times patients would die because there was no oxygen,” he recalls. Olayo started Hewatele to address the shortage of medical oxygen in Kenya. The startup closed $10.5 million in financing from AfricInvest to build a new medical oxygen manufacturing plant near Nairobi that will deliver a reliable, locally made supply to nearby hospitals and clinics.

  • Career shift. Kenya, like most African countries, imports most of its medical oxygen, which makes it prohibitively expensive for small facilities to keep enough on hand. Olayo hadn’t planned to leave his medical practice to try to solve the problem until he trained at Harvard as a public health specialist. “It was an important part of my career,” he says. “It made me bold and confident that I could change the world, however a small way.” His first attempt, upon returning to Kenya, was to set up a nonprofit to build small oxygen plants and donate them to hospitals. It failed. Within two years, none of the 14 plants he’d launched were operational. Olayo flipped his approach, setting up Hewatele in 2013 as a business that produced and sold oxygen to local medical facilities.
  • Sustainable impact. Hewatele distributes medical oxygen from six plants in Kenya and Uganda to more than 400 facilities, mostly in rural or low-income urban areas. Because the oxygen is made locally and transported short distances, Hewatele can sell at a fraction of the cost of other suppliers. The company’s current production barely makes a dent in the need, but its new plant will boost capacity tenfold. Construction plans hit a snag this year when a $10 million loan from the US International Development Finance Corp., approved last year under the Biden administration, failed to materialize under the Trump administration. AfricInvest stepped in to fill the funding gap. Olayo says he sees the impact of his work daily. Care providers at one Catholic-run facility near its Siaya plant on Lake Victoria told him they used to lose three to five babies per month because of their oxygen shortage. “Now, several months go by without losing a baby,” Olayo says. “That is the most impactful story I’ve ever heard.”
  • Keep reading, “A doctor-turned-founder builds a local solution to East Africa’s medical oxygen shortage,” by Lucy Ngige.

Weekend Watching: Pop Impact

Standing up to polluters, and power, on view at the Woods Hole Film Festival. In his latest Pop Impact columns, Dmitriy Ioselevich shares two more reviews from the Woods Hole Film Festival. One documentary focuses on toxic waste and another on the trade-offs between economic development and social and environmental harm. Dmitriy scores each documentary on a scale of one to 10, with five possible points each for entertainment and impact.

  • Unearth (2024): The promise of activism. The documentary examines the fight against Alaska’s Pebble Mine, where Indigenous activists and salmon fishermen joined forces to protect Bristol Bay’s ecosystem and livelihoods from industrial mining. The film situates this struggle within a global debate about the balance between economic growth and environmental protection, focusing on the unequal power dynamics between corporations with vast resources and communities armed mainly with determination. With imagery of dam failures and on-the-ground testimony from “the salmon people of Alaska,” the documentary emphasizes the threat mining poses to ecosystems and cultures. Dmitriy’s score: Entertainment: 3.5, Impact: 4.5. Check out the review.
  • Out of Plain Sight (2024): Directors Rosanna Xia and Daniel Straub explore the legacy of DDT waste dumped off the coast of Southern California. The film shows how the toxic pesticide, once celebrated as a miracle chemical, continues to wreak havoc half a century since it was banned. With scenes of sea lions with tumors and evidence of contamination across the food chain, the film lays bare the dangers of treating oceans as dumping grounds. The directors drive home a sobering message: human and environmental health are inseparable, and the costs of unchecked chemical pollution cannot remain hidden forever. Dmitriy’s score: Entertainment: 3.5, Impact: 4.5. Read the review.

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

Jess Brooks told ImpactAlpha she will be departing from her role as investor relations director of Social Finance… CalSTRS appointed Kristy Jenkinson as senior investment director of private markets and sustainable investment and of stewardship strategies… Impact Capital Managers promoted Garrett Jaso to communications and policy director… Kate Cochran and Cody Sims joined Anderson Venture Impact Partners as instructors.

Aurum Impact welcomed Lucia Buser as an impact investing intern… Banyan Infrastructure added Rob Glen, previously with Acanthus Climate Ventures, as senior director of business development for funds and developers… Parrish Pepestem, previously with Boston Consulting Group, joined Raven Indigenous Capital Partners as an investment analyst… Ownership Works welcomed Angela Duffy, previously with UNICEF USA, as senior director of marketing and communications. 

Groundwork Collaborative welcomed Charisma Troiano, previously with the US Department of Energy, as chief of communications… Nina Aicardi, previously with Institutional Shareholders Services, joined T. Rowe Price as head of corporate governance of the Americas… Sierra Club Foundation added Sara Murphy, previously with The Shareholder Commons, as director of Shifting Trillions, a campaign to move capital away from fossil fuels and into the sustainable economy… The Media Development Investment Fund promoted Diego Jaime as director of operations.

That’s a wrap. Have a wonderful weekend. 

– Aug. 29, 2025