AfricaTrustGroup – INVESTING IN AFRICA’S WOMEN

Who we are

We are holistic early stage gender-lens investors committed to investing in Africa’s Women entrepreneurs.

Our focus industries :

Social-impact technology
Manufacturing and raw material processing
Infrastructure development (affordable housing and sanitation)
Agriculture and agricultural value chains
Media and communications

What We Do

We are holistic early stage gender-lens investors committed to investing in Africa’s Women entrepreneurs

Our holistic approach to investing encompasses :

Early stage gender-lens funding
Entrepreneur and enterprise development
Access to markets and trade facilitation
Business research and support services

Early-stage gender lens funding

Research has shown that the biggest obstacle women face when starting and growing any business is access to funding and ability to raise capital. The IFC reports an approximate $320 billion dollar gap in financing for women and that women-owned businesses appear restricted in their growth paths and are therefore skewed towards smaller firms. This is in spite of the fact that it has been found that female-owned businesses consistently out-survive male-owned businesses in many industries and areas.

Africa trust group through its gender-lens fund seeks to address this early stage funding gap by financing women’s businesses in Africa using various vehicles

Entrepreneur and enterprise development

Leaders set the tone, pace and culture of an organisation. Therefore, ensuring that the entrepreneur is developing both their personal leadership capacity and business skills is cardinal to creating a growing enterprise that can scale. ATG through its academy provides leadership development programmes aimed at developing the entrepreneurs leadership excellence and business skills to ensure that they remain relevant in a growing organization and dynamic market environment.

To improve their chances of survival and growth early stage businesses often need enterprise development support. Our hands-on enterprise devolopment program supports our entrepreneurs with internal capacity building, business model development and refinement and strategy development.

Access to markets and trade facilitation

Reseach has shown that in developed economies, more than one-fifth of women entrepreneurs report 25% or more of sales go to customers outside their economies signaling good access to markets. This is in strong contrast to only 6% in developing economies including sub-Saharan Africa.

ATG supports early stage women businesses in Africa to gain access to markets through

Trade facilitation into other African countries and overseas markets
Enabling access to international trade forums
Introducing and connecting them to key continental and international networks through various online and offline networking opportunities.

Access-to-Markets-and-Trade-facilitation

Business research and support services

In this information economy it is easy for business small business owners to get lost in multitude of information and data that comes their way through social media, news, policy maker announcements and through peers and customers. Trying to wade through the information can often take up a business owners time that could be better invested in strategy execution and providng leadership. ATG throughs its insights engine provides critical business research and insights generation support to early stage women entreprises that is analysed, contextualised and presented timely and succintly to enable the business owners to turn the information and insights to action and remain agile in a dynamic business environment.

Through its centralized network of service providers and consultants, ATG supports early stage women entrepreneurs with access to support services including accounting, legal, project management, marketing and tech