Dear Friends and Partners,

It’s been another very challenging year for our team, clients, and the countries across Africa in which we work. Throughout, we have continually been encouraged by this resilience and our team’s passion to serve entrepreneurs, investors, and development partners in pursuit of our mission – to advance African economies and build future generations of business leaders.  We are very proud to have achieved two major growth milestones in the midst of this – completing 1,000 engagements and raising over $1 billion for our African clients!

We are excited by our work with a number of high-impact, pioneering businesses, innovative impact investors, and catalytic & risk-taking development partners. To give only a few examples, in the past year we have:

• Improved strategy and operations to help scale a locally-owned, female-run tech-enabled smart trade & logistics company in Ghana
• Supported 100 women-led businesses to identify key growth priorities through Invest2Impact
• Raised $75M local currency debt in the off-grid solar sector to expand solar access to hundreds of thousands of householders, through our partnership with Power Africa 
• Provided multiple stages of support to scale growth and raise debt & equity for tilapia farming to ensure access to sustainable protein throughout East Africa
• Built a strategy to scale an innovative waste-to-value company across Africa, partnering closely with a DFI
• Deepened relationships with key Kenyan municipalities to attract investment and crowd-in capital for sustainable infrastructure, through FCDO’s Sustainable Urban Economic Development program and USAID’s Kenya Investment Mechanism

We couldn’t have achieved this without our phenomenal team of >150, representing 20+ nationalities across Africa and the world, as well as each of our partners globally. Thank you!

As we look forward, we are encouraged by working in-person again, on factory floors & in clinics with our growing business clients, and brainstorming new blended finance structures with investors & development partners around the world. There is no substitute for these personal connections, and we’re excited to have expanded our full-time presence into Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire as well as grown our teams in Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, and Zambia. More than ever, this pandemic has sharpened our understanding of the urgency of the challenges we’re trying to address. Our clients are working on the front lines of climate change mitigation, food security, access to healthcare, education, and youth employment, among others, and yet we still feel we are just scratching the surface. We’re working on a number of new initiatives to ramp up our own efforts in these areas and will be excited to announce new partnerships and approaches in 2022.

For now, a big thank you to our team (and alumni!), clients, and partners that have allowed us to come this far and who are making such a difference in Africa. We look forward to seeing you on the continent soon!

Annie, Andreas & the Open Capital Team!