What the fund learned about shaping the enabling environment for investment vehicles and portfolio companies to thrive
The first three learning books document what the Fund did inside its portfolio: how capital moved to investment vehicles, how services strengthened enterprises, and how employment emerged through a chain of conditions rather than a single intervention. Each book ends similarly, naming constraints that sit outside the Fund’s direct control but inside its responsibility to name.
This book begins there, within the ecosystem.
The Fund was designed with a theory that moving capital differently in Africa would both require and produce changes in the surrounding environment. Capital flowed to first-time women fund managers, with local domiciliation requirements, into job-intensive sectors, through instruments that could reach informal market segments. Enabling each of those component pieces to thrive required an intentional and carefully-targeted systems intervention.
That is what the Fund’s ecosystem strategy was built to address: the work that needed to happen outside immediate investments and business development services (BDS), in the broader environment that determines whether those investments can achieve their intended effect. This book documents how that strategy was developed, what the Fund learned by executing it across four distinct segments of the ecosystem, including what worked, what didn’t, and where the work needed goes beyond what any single fund can achieve.
The learnings in this book are drawn from the Fund’s own experience. They are presented as an honest account of what enabling environment work looks like in practice.