The Week in impact investing: Trade, aid and played

TGIF, Agents of Impact! 

🎥 If you’re in Boston, please join us for Saturday night at the movies. The Boston International Film Festival has selected “Equity and ownership: Napoleon Wallace and the Reconstruction of Black wealth,” for its showcase, Saturday, April 12, at 7:30pm ET. Be sure to buy your tickets. We’ll be gathering at 5:30pm at the nearby Granary Tavern. The first round is on us. We hope to see you there!

🎉 A warm welcome to new enterprise-level subscribers at Pivotal Ventures, Impact Assets Capital, GEM Investments and Working Capital Fund. You, too, can bring ImpactAlpha to your team, your firm, your network or your school at a healthy discount. Get onboarded. 

🗣Purple party. “We needed this,” more than a few people said this past week at our Re:Construction gatherings in North Carolina and Washington, DC. The themes of people, purpose and perseverance served as a welcome counterpoint to the week’s chaotic and even debilitating news cycle. The title of the mini-documentary we’ve been screening on our spring tour, “Equity and ownership,” calls out key pillars of a growing “playbook for shared prosperity” (fill out this short form to add your own play to the playbook). For the Washington screening, Kimberlee Cornett of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation urged Agents of Impact to wear purple to emphasize that affordable housing, small business financing, good jobs and healthy communities are not “red” or “blue” issues; with common cause we can improve the lives of families of all kinds. That GOOD TRBL’s Napoleon Wallace, the subject of the 20-minute film, is carrying on that work while living with advanced ALS is a challenge to all of us to keep moving forward.

The volatility of this historical moment may yet widen “the Overton window” of possible future arrangements. Even as the Trump administration’s evisceration of USAID continued, rethinking global aid was the prime topic at last week’s Skoll World Forum, as Open Road’s Caroline Bressan wrote in her dispatch from Oxford. Strategies to expand economic opportunities and financial access for women in Africa are advancing from inclusion to agency, Lucy Ngige reported. The trade war, and even an incipient recession, present both perils and possibilities. For example, uncorrelated impact investments in vehicles and ventures that provide goods and services to meet basic needs, particularly in emerging markets, become more attractive in comparison to risky and volatile public equities and legacy strategies. We (half) joked that President Trump could be a secret green degrowther, given that a sudden global contraction could reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as happened during the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 and the Covid-19 shutdown of 2020. A survey of asset owners, with a combined total of $1.5 trillion in assets, found plans to boost climate allocations, wrote Dalberg’s Kusi Hornberger and Nadia Ralston. 

The work goes on. “I needed tonight, because I’m in the middle of a couple different fights,” Opportunity Finance Network’s Harold Pettigrew said in the post-film discussion in Washington. “I sleep well lately, because I know I have history on my side. The people who I work with and who I support, what we do is right. And we have to stay energized for the fight.” – David Bank and Amy Cortese

The Week’s Podcasts

The ImpactAlpha Podcast Network is growing. We launched our first in-house podcast, Returns on Investment, 10 years ago. In 2020, we spun out the news-focused This Week in Impact and the interview series, Agents of Impact. Last year we launched the ImpactAlpha Podcast Network to bring diverse perspectives, voices and areas of focus to our growing audience, or as our tagline says, “smart conversations by and for impact investing professionals.” We’re excited to welcome to the network the Activest Podcast, in which hosts Micah Gilmer and John Killeen and panelists Homero Radway and Ellen Ward, explore strategies for fiscal justice and place-based impact; and the Criterion Institute Podcast, where Joy Anderson tells stories and hosts conversations about gender, impact and how finance can be used for social change. Want to add your podcast to the network? Drop us a line. 

This week’s episodes:

• 🎧 This Week in Impact. Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor David Bank, live-ish from the Re:Construction spring tour. Up this week: What this tariffying week for Wall Street and global trade means for impact investors. Foreign aid after USAID. And what goes into assembling a playbook for shared prosperity. Listen to the new episode of This Week in Impact. Get the podcast in your feed by subscribing on Apple or Spotify.
  
• 🗺️ The Activest Podcast. In Episode Three of the Activist Podcast, Micah, John, Homero and Ellen discuss the impact on communities of the tax incentive scheme called “payments in lieu of taxes,” or PILOTs. In Asbury Park, NJ, $19.6 million in PILOTs have led to huge increases in property value, benefiting developers without boosting educational outcomes; only 10% of third graders read at grade level. Spoiler alert: There are alternative funding mechanisms to achieve equitable development. Check it out.
  
• 📯 The Criterion Institute Podcast. For its 50th episode, Criterion’s Joy Anderson and ImpactAlpha’s David Bank welcome the Criterion Institute Podcast to the ImpactAlpha Podcast Network with a lively conversation about the “power of voice” in impact investing and the role of media in shaping narratives. Listen now.

The Week’s Agent of Impact

Tokunboh Ishmael, Alitheia Capital: Building Africa’s gender-lens opportunities from fundraise to exit. Tokunboh Ishmael isn’t dispirited by the rocky forecasts for private equity fundraising amid market volatility. “Difficult” is nothing new for Ishmael, who spent more than five years trying to raise one of Africa’s first gender-lens private equity funds. Her firm, Alitheia Capital, is working to launch its second fund with a goal of $200 million — double its  predecessor. To win over investors still wary of investing in women in Africa, she aims to prove they can get their money back. Exhibit A: The firm’s recent exit from small business lender Baobab Nigeria, which netted a 3x return. Many African private equity markets are nascent, undercapitalized and underresourced. The retreat of overseas development finance means capital is more scarce than ever. “We’re growing assets in a very hostile environment,” Ishmael tells ImpactAlpha. “You have to have innovative instruments to have a broader pool of strategic and financial buyers.”

Exits are on Ishmael’s mind a lot these days. Many private equity and impact investment firms in Africa are nearing the end of their first funds’ investment cycles. In addition to finding strategic acquirers, she’s looking at creative investment strategies like self-liquidating or redeemable instruments, or selling equity stakes back to founders. “We need to think about new ways in which our stock exchanges accommodate smaller businesses,” she adds (see, “Early growth-stage companies are going public in Africa”). With its second fund, Alitheia is looking to expand its gender-lens strategy into energy efficiency and digital infrastructure, “which broadens access to essential goods, services and markets,” Ishmael says. Being an African woman raising a gender-lens fund is an uphill climb, particularly in today’s geopolitical environment, but investors also have greater comfort and familiarity with the lens than they did when Alitheia launched its first fund a decade ago. Says Ishmael, “There has been a widening of the gates, and there has been a spotlight on the strategy.” 

• Keep reading, “Tokunboh Ishmael: Building Africa’s gender-lens opportunities from fundraise to exit,” by Lucy Ngige on ImpactAlpha.

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 check out all of this week’s dealflow reporting.

Dao Nguyen of The New York Times, joined the board of directors at Media Development Investment Fund… Neil Bose, previously with White Star Capital, joined Convergence Blended Finance as a senior associate… The DC Green Bank added Douglas Wilberding, a former director at LISC Strategic Investments, as origination senior director… ESG Global welcomed Boris Couteaux, previously with Impak Analytics, as principal… Katherine Hernandez, previously with Impactual, joined Ownership Works as a senior associate.

Izzy Schmidt, previously with Beyond Capital Ventures, joined Quona Capital as investor relations and ESG associate… LISC’s Kalamazoo, Mich. office added Jackie Koney, former development and operations director of Salzburg Global Seminar, as executive director… Alleviate Impact Capital welcomed Bhoomika Gupta, an MBA candidate at Duke University Fuqua School of Business, as a strategy consultant… Surdna Foundation promoted Bria Graham to senior program associate of its Inclusive Economies grant program.

That’s a wrap. Have a wonderful weekend. 

– April 11, 2025