The Brief

The Brief: Zambia looks to small businesses as pathway to inclusive growth 

ImpactAlpha · June 25, 2026

Greetings, Agents of Impact! 

In today’s newsletter:

  • Centering small businesses for shared prosperity in Zambia
  • Boosting farmer productivity in Senegal
  • Securitizing off-grid solar 
  • Tools to manage African currency risk

Zambia centers small businesses in its bid for a more inclusive economy. Top-down, bottom-up, public-private. Zambia, a country known for big mining, is turning to small business as a pathway to inclusive growth. Government and private sector leaders are creating strategies to support economic opportunity and ownership through small enterprises. The efforts include a financing initiative backed by the Bank of Zambia; an angel investing network; and a private credit fund tapping Zambia’s diaspora community for funding. “When the small business sector grows, that production circulates within the ecosystem and the multiplier effect is much higher,” than any individual sector like mining, says Austin Mwape, the former deputy governor of the state-owned Bank of Zambia. While the landlocked Southern African country has enjoyed decades of growth thanks to its substantial reserves of copper and cobalt, those riches have not been widely shared among Zambia’s roughly 23 million people. Many of the largest, most productive mines are owned by foreign companies. “Growth has not been inclusive,” Mwape tells ImpactAlpha on the sidelines of the Africa Impact Summit hosted earlier this month in Lusaka (see, “Demand for critical minerals creates new opportunities to put Africa first“).  

  • Public sector signals. Zambian small businesses, like those in most emerging economies, are a major driver of jobs but are underserved by mainstream finance. Through the Bank of Zambia, the government is anchoring the Small and Growing Business Initiative, or SGBI, an initiative of the Zambia National Advisory Board for Impact Investment to encourage financial institutions to lend to small businesses. The Bank of Zambia’s $260 million in first-loss debt financing is meant to crowd in private institutions. Regulated commercial banks will be able to apply to SGBI for low-cost capital to lend to small businesses at lower than usual rates and buffer risk. SGBI will also stand up a fund to invest in venture capital and private equity funds providing longer-term growth capital. The goal is for SGBI to attract support from institutional investors, like pension funds, and eventually become independent. For now, the government plays a crucial signaling role for private investors, Mwape says. “We are hoping that through the demonstration effects, they will develop interest with time.”
  • Tapping the diaspora. At the other end of the spectrum are grassroots and private sector-led efforts to accelerate Zambia’s small business growth. Africa Equity Group set up an evergreen private credit fund, Borderless Africa, as a “structured pathway” for the African diaspora to invest in businesses in Zambia, Kenya and Rwanda. Overseas Africans send roughly $100 billion a year back to their local friends, families and communities. The Zambia Business Angels Network is also fundraising from the diaspora to provide debt, equity and hybrid funding through convertible and SAFE notes to Zambian companies in renewable energy, edtech, fintech, food production and more. “I’ve been there. I bootstrapped friends and family money. I remember how hard it was, and it still is, to get financing,” ZBAN’s co-founder Greg Marchand shares. ZBAN has built a network of more than two dozen angel investors. An upcoming roadshow in the US is expected to recruit more. “It is almost like they were waiting for us,” says Marchand. “They just wanted a way to plug in, and they didn’t know how.”

Dealflow: Financing Farmers

Kampani lends €1 million to boost productivity for small farmers in Senegal. Brussels-based impact fund Kampani provided a €1 million ($1.2 million) senior unsecured loan to the Union of Community Mutual Institutions for Savings and Credit, or U-IMEC, a rural microfinance network in Senegal that began as a union of savings and credit cooperatives in Senegal. The funding will enable U-IMCEC to help more farmers adopt solar irrigation, processing equipment, water management systems, and other equipment that can boost their productivity and increase climate resilience. The cooperative network will set up a dedicated agricultural portfolio that can make bigger loans and match the seasonal timelines farmers need to pay them back. Since its founding nearly three decades ago, U-IMCEC has expanded to offer financial literacy training, microinsurance products and mobile money solutions. 

  • Farmer finance. Kampani was launched in 2015 by Belgian farmer organization Boerenbond, the King Baudouin Foundation, social impact investment cooperative Alterfin and other Belgian investors to supply equity and long-term debt to agriculture companies in Africa, Latin America and Asia. It sources deals from its nonprofit network. Over two-thirds of its portfolio are Africa-based companies, including coffee cooperative Cookkanz in the Democratic Republic of Congo; Bio Phyto, which produces organic fertilizers and pesticides in Benin; and the National Union of Women Rice Parboilers in Burkina Faso.
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D.light tops $1 billion in securitized financing. Off-grid solar financing is finding its way into public debt markets. D.light, an African provider of pay-as-you-go solar systems and appliances, closed a $50 million green bond backed by income from customers’ payments. The issuance, which will be listed on the London Stock Exchange, is among the first public-market securitizations backed by off-grid solar receivables. Impact manager African Frontier Capital structured the bond. The bond carries a BBB rating from Sustainable Fitch. It is fully guaranteed by the Green Guarantee Company, an emerging-markets climate guarantor backed by the Green Climate Fund, KfW and others, which helped attract investors including Legal & General, Calvert Impact Capital and family office Ceniarth. “This is an important step toward opening larger pools of institutional capital for energy access and toward achieving universal access to affordable, reliable and sustainable energy,” d.light’s team wrote. 

  • Scaling impact. Under d.light’s pay-as-you-go model, customers purchase solar home systems and appliances over time through installment payments. Packaging those receivables into securities allows d.light to raise capital to provide more customer credit. Since 2020, d.light has completed a series of receivables-backed financings, including a $238 million multi-currency facility in Kenya, a $125 million facility in Tanzania, and a local currency securitization in Nigeria. Together with the latest bond, those transactions have pushed d.light’s securitized financing to more than $1 billion. The company expects to support more than 20 million first-time energy connections and create more than 50,000 jobs by 2030. 

Other investment news crossing our desks:

  • Energy-focused impact investor All On invested $1 million in solar cold-chain company Eja-Ice Nigeria to expand refrigeration infrastructure for off-grid communities. (All On)
  • The African Development Bank became the first institutional shareholder in the ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development, committing $30 million in equity and a $70 million credit line for renewable energy financing in West Africa. (EBID)

Impact Voices: Risk Management

Rethinking currency risk to accelerate African dealmaking. Africa is a continent full of young people, vast natural resources and fast-growing economies and consumer markets. So why is “risk” still the predominant focus for most investors? “Ask why, and the immediate answer might be political risk. Push a little harder, and you get a different response: currency risk,” observe Caroline Chinhuru, Sithara Rasheed and Katherine Tang. The three honed their skills as impact investors at Calvert Impact, Artisan Partners, the Rockefeller Foundation and BCG. Now, as Stanford MBA candidates, they are exploring why currency risk in Africa preoccupies a full 86% of fund managers and 64% of limited partners when there are established financial tools to manage that risk. They polled 15 public market managers, private equity investors, and blended-finance specialists. “The most common instinct for investors is to try to hedge their currency risk exposure,” they find. But the most common hedge products “can be expensive enough to kill deals before they start. Perfectly good investments therefore get shelved because the currency math feels impossible.” 

  • Hedge smarter. Nearly 95% of African fund managers say they don’t use specially designed facilities to hedge currency risk because of the cost. Partial, dynamic and portfolio-level hedging are all alternative options. Nuveen, T. Rowe Price, Franklin Templeton and Ashmore use dynamic hedging, adjusting coverage based on market conditions instead of committing to full protection upfront. BlackRock and PIMCO  hedge their aggregate portfolio rather than at the individual deal level.
  • Eliminate risk at the source. Most foreign investment in Africa arrives in dollars, while an investments’ revenues are generated in local currencies. KfW and Cygnum Capital’s African Local Currency Bond Fund leverages a first-loss layer from KfW and FSDAi to protect investors from currency volatility. Off-grid energy investor CrossBoundary designs special purpose vehicles that isolate local currency cash flows and align operational costs with local revenues. “These are tools sophisticated investors in other markets already reach for instinctively,” the authors write. Impact and development-focused investors should too. “In Africa, a region where most players are still treating currency risk as a reason to pass on deals, that willingness is its own edge.”
  • Keep reading, “Rethinking currency risk to accelerate African dealmaking,” by Caroline Chinhuru, Sithara Rasheed and Katherine Tang.

Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent

Adam Kybird, formerly of Triodos Investment Management, joins Pymwymic as associate partner… Marie Heydenreich joins Triodos Investment Management as fund manager of Hivos-Triodos Fonds… Global Social Impact Investments names Theany Bazet investment director of the firm’s Africa impact investing arm… Akinwumi Adesina will chair Botswana’s Diamonds for Development Fund.

FSD Africa seeks a sustainable finance specialist in Nairobi… Accion Digital Transformation is hiring a regional partner for Africa… The International Finance Corp. has an opening for an investment officer in Benin to focus on West Africa… The Africa Enterprise Challenge Fund is recruiting a head of investment operations… ResponsAbility is looking for an investment associate focused on financial inclusion debt in Cape Town. 

👉 View (or post) impact investing jobs on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.

Thank you for your impact!

– June 25, 2026