Businesses

We support businesses with the potential to create substantial value and impact. We work with a diverse range of clients including SMEs, established local corporates, and large multinationals. Through our deep engagement across client types, we have developed a nuanced understanding of local market dynamics in each of the sectors and geographies in which we work.

For all clients, we provide intensive, operationally focused advisory services to improve performance and enable growth. For businesses that require our help in raising capital, we bring expertise in structuring, negotiating, and executing transactions with a broad network of over 200 local and international investors.

Additionally, through our Arcadia practice, we provide exceptional business and analytical talent to business for 3-6 months or on a rotating basis for longer-term roles. Our Analysts oversee projects, fill unplanned staffing vacancies, and improve the effectiveness of senior leaders ensuring missing talent is never a barrier to growth.

Investors

For investors, we offer highly skilled professionals based in African markets. Our clients include global private equity funds, impact investors, family offices, angel investors, foundations, and institutional investors.

We provide two areas of investor support:

Fund strategy, structuring, and design:

Based on investment objectives, we help design fund structures and strategies, develop financial products to target risk/reward criteria, prepare financial projections to evaluate potential financial and social returns, and draft offering memoranda.

Pre-investment:

Many investors identify promising businesses that require support before an investment is possible. We conduct rigorous due diligence, perform valuations, draft term sheets, and prepare forward-looking business & capital use strategies. This work sets clear milestones on which businesses and investors can agree.

Development Partners

We believe in the power of markets to create jobs, transform lives, and advance economies. We bring deep commercial expertise to development challenges, helping to design creative financing mechanisms, create new market linkages, improve fragmented value chains, and transition donor-financed projects to sustainable initiatives.

We provide support to:

Design innovative market-based funds and solutions:

We help our clients plan investment approaches, design financing vehicles, and create new financial products that blend social and financial return. Our approach combines financial expertise with operational experience, leading to outcomes that are ready for implementation.

See our case studies here for examples where we have designed unique funds for large institutions such as DFID, USAID, and IFC, as well as smaller impact investors including family offices and high net worth individuals.

Public Sector

Governments face tight budgets and ever-expanding service needs from constituents. We bring a data-driven approach, using rigorous analysis to help the public sector deliver services effectively and efficiently. We help answer key questions before governments commit scarce resources. As part of our work, we strengthen public sector teams, building skills to drive implementation.

Common areas of support for public sector entities include:

Strategic planning:

We support governments to identify, evaluate, and define key strategic priorities. For specific projects or objectives, we conduct in-depth feasibility studies to evaluate and compare a range of scenarios and outline concrete implementation plans for our recommendations.

Program design & optimization:

We design new initiatives to meet public sector goals, for example determining specific services to offer, defining optimal program sizes, assessing key risks, and building detailed financial models to test program budgeting.