Resources & Research

Sir Bob Geldof’s latest incarnation says something about Africa’s changing place in the world. Not for the first time, the Irish rock star turned campaigner for aid and debt relief in Africa has been seeking to raise as much as $1-billion. This time, however, he hopes to champion investment in a continent that he had tended to portray as a basket case in perennially urgent need of alms.

His transformation into private equity guru has not been seamless. The former Boomtown Rats and Band Aid frontman has struggled since the global financial crisis to raise sufficient financing to close his fund, 8 Miles, named after the distance between Europe and Africa at the straits of Gibraltar. But Sir Bob’s journey nevertheless chimes with a turnround in global perceptions.

The full Globe and Mail article can be viewed online here.

Over the past decade mobile phones have helped to transform African countries like Kenya, giving the financially excluded a cheap way to access credit through mobile banking. It has also been Africa’s most successful growth story: the mobile payment market is forecast to be worth $60bn by 2015. Today, information and communication technology (ICT) companies are building the infrastructure for what investors believe will be Africa’s next big growth story – PayTV.

On Monday Wananchi Group, a Kenyan media operator, announced that it raised $57.5m of growth capital to continue building fibre infrastructure for its triple-play service in Kenya.

The full Financial Times article can be viewed online by clicking here.

While some press reports have played up failures in India, the heart of the industry remains strong

Diego Treminio leans back in his rocking chair and gestures to the expansive patio that looks out onto the Nicaraguan hills. Whenever he makes money he invests in one of three things – his house, his farm or his children’s education.

On all three scores he has done well. Besides the patio, he has added several rooms to his house. He has tripled the size of his farm to 65 acres. Several children have graduated from university.

This, he says, is because of help from MEDA – both its sesame project that operated for several years, and its microfinance program, MiCredito, of which Treminio is a client.

He can’t say enough good about MiCredito and the way affordable credit can transform a small farm. He knows there are other microfinance institutions (MFIs) in Nicaragua, but he wants nothing to do with them. “They abuse the producer,” he says bluntly, “and they charge higher interest.”

Read more from the January/February edition of Marketplace Magazine.

Each month, an impact investor discusses with the GIIN his or her motivations, impact investment strategy, and challenges faced in this growing industry. This month, we spoke to Gerhard Pries, President of Sarona Asset Management, a boutique investment firm that has focused on impact investing since its inception in 1953. Sarona recently launched Sarona Frontier Markets Fund I LP, one of the first impact investing fund of funds.

Read the full interview with Gerhard Pries >

Sarona Asset Management was recently featured in Venture Equity Latin America (May 15, 2010) By Dan Weil.

Read the article

The NY Times published an interesting article showing developing countries have performed well in the past decade with basic services improving significantly for many of the world’s poor. More can be found by clicking this link.

A New York Times article demonstrates that several emerging markets have outperformed the S&P 500 over the past decade.  This is in line with our belief that growth in emerging and frontier markets will continue to out pace growth in developed markets in the foreseeable future.  The full article can be viewed online by clicking here.