A first-time fund manager in Dar es Salaam is asked by a prospective investor for evidence that impact investing works in emerging markets. Where do they send them?
The most complete public answer in English is the Impact Investing Institute’s case study library, built with Dalberg Advisors and supported by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s IMPACT Programme. It is a serious piece of work, freely available, and it does something the sector generally fails to do: it names actual vehicles, with actual structures, rather than describing a category.
It is also built for a specific reader, and the manager in Dar es Salaam is not that reader. That is worth being precise about, because the gap is instructive rather than a fault.
What is in it
The emerging markets set is organised by asset class: public bonds, private equity funds, private debt funds, public equity funds, social impact bonds, and infrastructure and real assets. Each class carries a profile summarising trends and opportunities, followed by named case studies.
Some of the market-level figures are the most useful part. Private equity penetration in emerging markets has raised over US$100 billion annually since 2014. Private debt hit a record US$9.4 billion in 2018 and is the largest asset class in impact investing, accounting for 37% of all investments, at both market and below-market rates. The African Development Bank’s social bond programme comprises five bonds totalling around US$5.3 billion, launched in 2017.
The named vehicles cover real ground. LeapFrog’s second financial inclusion fund launched in 2014, closed oversubscribed, and raised US$400 million for financial inclusion across Africa and South Asia. African Development Partners III backs consumer goods, financial services, education, healthcare and agri-business for the emerging African middle class. There is a hybrid equity and debt agricultural inclusion fund, a Danish climate fund, an Actis energy fund, an affordable housing fund operating in South Africa, Botswana and Namibia, a humanitarian impact bond issued by the ICRC, and the Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund.
What transfers
Three things, and they are not small.
The instrument catalogue transfers. A fund manager reading this library learns that redeemable structures, hybrid debt-equity vehicles, outcome-linked bonds and blended multi-donor facilities have all been raised and deployed in markets like theirs. That is useful when a prospective investor implies the only options are conventional equity or nothing.
The structural detail transfers. Case studies that specify de-risking approaches, investor types and return expectations give a first-time manager language for their own term sheet.
The precedent transfers, which is the point of an evidence base. Someone did this, at this size, in this geography, and the fund closed.
What does not
The library is organised by asset class, which means it is organised around the question an allocator asks. An allocator asks which sleeve of the portfolio this belongs in. An enterprise, or a manager raising a first fund from local capital, asks a different question: what instrument fits a business with real cash flows, no exit horizon and a founder who is not planning to sell.
Scale is the second mismatch. A US$400 million oversubscribed fund and a US$5.3 billion bond programme are not reference points for a first close in the single-digit millions. They demonstrate that the asset class exists. They demonstrate nothing about what is achievable at the size most African fund managers are actually raising.
Then there is the age of the evidence. The emerging markets page was last updated in January 2024, and several of the headline figures beneath it are older than that: the private debt record is from 2018, the private equity trend line starts in 2014. A published case study library that stops being updated does not become wrong. It becomes a historical record, and it stops answering the question a manager is asking now, which is what closed last year.
The one that fits
Of the vehicles in the emerging markets set, one is built for the market Kipimo works in. Novastar Ventures’ East Africa Fund I and Africa Fund II support early and growth stage companies serving the low-income mass market across East Africa, Nigeria and Ghana.
One out of roughly fifteen. That ratio is not a criticism of the library, which never claimed to be an East Africa resource. It is a description of how much documented, citable, institutionally credible evidence exists in English for the specific proposition that early-stage capital serving low-income East African customers can be structured, raised and returned.
What is missing is not more case studies
The obvious response is to ask for a bigger library. That is the wrong ask.
A static case study collection ages from the day it publishes, and the effort of assembling it is largely retrospective research: reading annual reports, interviewing managers, writing up what already happened. The same effort applied continuously, against live public sources, would produce something a manager could query rather than browse. Our partners at Impact Intelligence have built exactly that for several venture philanthropy networks, and the design difference is that the evidence updates itself.
The question is not whether there are enough documented examples of impact investing in emerging markets. Fifteen well-written case studies already prove the instruments work. It is whether the evidence a first-time African fund manager needs is being produced at the size, in the geography and on the timeline where the decision is actually being made, or whether it is being written up four years later for a reader in London.
