5 years of implementation have generated important lessons. The Mastercard Foundation Africa Growth Fund’s Learning Series captures what we have learned about designing, governing, and deploying capital, and the conditions that need to be in place for investment to create dignified and fulfilling work for young people, particularly young women, across Africa.
This series traces the Fund’s learning journey through the investment system: from how capital was designed and governed, to the conditions that enable enterprise performance, to what it means to contribute to the conditions for job creation, and finally to the ecosystem forces that shaped who benefited and whether change endured.
How capital is structured shapes who can access it.
Support can expand agency and unlock opportunity.
Job creation unfolds as a sequence of conditions.
The environment decides what investment can achieve.
How capital is structured shapes who can access it. Each design choice sends a signal about whose knowledge, leadership, and business models are treated as credible. The Fund learned that deploying capital differently meant examining how governance structures, screening criteria, and standards associated with investment readiness can quietly reproduce the very biases it set out to challenge.
Business development services were more than a support function. They helped strengthen the wider market by connecting businesses to the knowledge, relationships and resources they needed to grow. The Fund learned that who shapes these services, how they are delivered and what success looks like can make a meaningful difference to their impact.
Investment does not translate into jobs through capital alone. Job creation emerges through a series of conditions, from reaching the right enterprises and supporting their stability, to enabling growth, strengthening the quality of work, and addressing the wider ecosystem factors that shape whether jobs can be sustained. The book explores these conditions and what they mean for creating dignified and fulfilling work for young people, particularly young women, across Africa.
The environment in which investments are made shapes what they can achieve. The Fund’s experience showed that capital and business development services are most effective when supported by a stronger enabling environment, one that connects investment capital, knowledge and norms, enterprises and markets, and policy and regulation.
Warehousing provides early, risk-tolerant capital to investment vehicles before first close, enabling fund managers to deploy capital, test their investment theses, and build the track record needed to attract further investment. The Fund’s experience showed that warehousing can serve different purposes, from demonstrating execution capacity to helping managers build the foundations for future growth.
Explore each topic further
