ImpactAlpha Open

Leveraging impact to drive performance + turning agricultural waste low-carbon products

Dennis Price · September 30, 2025

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In this week’s Open:

  • GPs are leveraging “impact” to drive portfolio performance
  • Transforming agricultural waste into low-carbon, high-impact products
  • Podcasts: Mark Campanale, Wilson Lester and Elizabeth Howard
  • Agent of Impact: Afrishela’s Jane Muia on underwriting with a gender lens (video)

Let’s jump in. – Dennis Price

Must-reads on ImpactAlpha

  • Even for GPs that shun the label, ‘impact’ drives portfolio performance. In the US and Europe, fund managers attempting to invest responsibly in the sectors of the future are struggling to navigate the backlashes to ESG, diversity, as well as misperceptions about impact investing. But if some GPs are leaning away from the impact label, more fund managers – including those that don’t self-identify as impact fund managers – are leaning into the practice, I report from London. Read on.
  • Charting a commercial path from low-carbon biofuels to carbon-negative biochar. Denmark and India-based Mash Makes, supplies biofuels for shipping companies, makes biochar to help farmers improve soil health, and even produces electricity as a byproduct of pyrolysis that could provide renewable energy for rural communities. “We want to make sure that every potential for impact – whether social, biodiversity or greenhouse gas emissions – is pursued.” Mash Makes’ Jakob Bejbro Andersen tells ImpactAlpha’s Lucy Ngige. Learn more.
  • Measuring founder ‘wealth creation’ to track the impact of small business finance. Until last year Founders First Capital Partners measured the impact of its small business financing using traditional metrics like job creation and revenue growth. The San Diego-based firm is now also tracking ‘projected wealth creation’ for the entrepreneurs it supports. “Wealth creation is not just a financial milestone. It is a structural change agent.” writes Founders First’s Kim Folsom in a guest post. Hear her out.

Sponsored by UNICEF Venture Fund

♀️ The rise of femtech in emerging markets

India-based CareNX’s Fetosense app is using AI and smartphones to reduce the likelihood of stillbirths by making fetal monitoring accessible to expecting mothers anywhere. A new wave of femtech startups, with innovative products and services designed specifically for women and girls, is transforming lives in emerging markets. Such solutions are an untapped engine of social and financial returns, UNICEF Venture Fund’s Sanna Bedi explains in a guest post on ImpactAlpha.

  • Open call. “When innovators design with women and girls in mind, they unlock solutions that improve health outcomes, strengthen financial agency and create safer, more inclusive communities,” she writes. And, because the sector is undervalued and under-invested, it offers “enormous potential for financial returns and transformative social impact.” The UNICEF Venture Fund’s five-year femtech initiative includes an open call for femtech innovations that has attracted more than 1,100 submissions from 85 countries.
  • Keep reading, “The rise of femtech in emerging markets,” by Sanna Bedi of UNICEF Venture Fund.

Agents of Impact

♀️ Afrishela’s Jane Muia: Underwriting with a gender lens in Africa (video)

Jane Muia remembers a loan that helped a woman who runs a sweet potato farm in Kenya nearly triple her yield per acre. “That allows the business to have increased incomes and improved livelihoods, which is exactly what we’re looking for,” Muia told ImpactAlpha in a video interview. Muia is a senior investment officer at Afrishela, a South African capital provider that makes impact-linked loans and revenue-based financing available to women-owned businesses in East and Southern Africa. Afrishela, managed by the Graça Machel Trust, is looking to raise $30 million and to push other financial institutions to adopt its alternative credit-risk assessment approach to accelerate women’s financial inclusion. 

🏃 On the move

  • LeapFrog Investments added Serhat Aydogdu,previously with Just Climate, as a climate associate director in its London office.
  • Media Development Investment Fund appointed Nolwazi Tusini as Southern Africa program director, and Adedeji Adekunle as West and East Africa program director.
  • Bluefront Equity welcomed Maria Benedicte Færevaag, previously with Norne Securities, as an investment associate.

The Week’s Podcast

🎧 This Week in Impact

Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with Amy Cortese and Dennis Price. Up this week: How investors at Climate Week NYC shook off the Trump doldrums. And how, from Singapore to London, even fund managers that shun the impact label are driving alpha with impact.

🦸 Agents of Impact: Carbon Tracker’s Mark Campanale on the strange split screen at Climate Week NYC. The Trump administration is strong-arming foreign nations into buying US gas and weakening climate policies. “The Europeans are not buying it,” Carbon Tracker’s Mark Campanale said on the latest Agents of Impact podcast. Nor are Asian countries. “The ones today who are taking sustainability more seriously than anyone else are the Chinese, the Koreans, the Singaporeans and groups in Indonesia, Malaysia,” he said. “It’s Asia, led by groups like Temasek, who are taking sustainability very, very seriously.” Read on and listen in.

🏘️ Community Capital Live: Unlocking ownership for Main Street entrepreneurs with Wilson Lester. Partners in Equity’s Wilson Lester joins Joel Skene to talk about how shared equity and downpayment assistance helps businesses acquire the commercial real estate where they operate. Says Lester:”We want to put the entrepreneur in a position of power and to be self-sufficient without needing a partner.” Watch the conversation, and RSVP for the next Community Capital Live, Wednesday, Oct. 8.

📯 The Criterion Institute Podcast: Rethinking local capital mobilization in Africa. Host Joy Anderson chats with Lelapa’s Elizabeth Howard about the challenges faced by female fund managers, the importance of local capital mobilization in Africa, and the need to adapt financing models and investment strategies for local contexts. Listen to the latest episode.

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