Situation
Despite strong and growing interest in impact investing in Sub-Saharan Africa, there was little existing research on impact investing markets at a country level. To address this information gap, OCA was mandated by the Global Impact Investor Network (the GIIN) to prepare and publish two landmark studies on the impact investing landscape across 11 countries in East Africa and 12 countries in Southern Africa. Our goal was to identify all relevant players, their activity to-date and capacities, market trends, broader ecosystem development, and the key challenges and opportunities in the impact investing landscape.
Our Process
OCA supported by:
- Interviewing over 100 impact investment ecosystem players, including local and international impact investors, development finance institutions (DFIs), social enterprises, and government institutions.
- Researching existing deal databases of all known impact investment deals in East and Southern Africa.
- Examining publicly available investor documents, organizational websites and press releases to compile a comprehensive database of impact investing activity across all 23 focus countries in East and Southern Africa.
- Distilling insights on impact investing activities and trends, including fund sizes, deal sizes, and focus sectors.
- Drafting landscape reports summarizing insights into market trends, key gaps and challenges facing the sector, potential opportunities, and the perspectives of each type of market player in the impact investing ecosystem in East and Southern Africa.
As a result, Open Capital and GIIN published the two reports, The Landscape for Impact Investing in East Africa and The Landscape for Impact Investing in Southern Africa, which are now publicly available at: www.thegiin.org/knowledge/publication/the-landscape-for-impact-investing-in-east-africa and www.thegiin.org/knowledge/publication/the-landscape-for-impact-investing-in-southern-africa.
