Last week in brief...We start with the news that Kibo Capital Partners' second fund has made its final deal, backing Transcom, a tertiary education business in Mozambique. The transaction brings the number of assets in the $63 million fund's portfolio to eleven. While the fund has yet to realize any exits, apparently plans are afoot to dispose of two of the assets before the end of this year.

Transcom is going to use the capital to help in the construction of a new campus in Maputo. Demand for the company vocational engineering and business management courses is very high, and its current capacity to deliver the courses in constrained.

Venture capital investments make up the remainder of the deals we covered last week. The largest of the three deals is a follow-on investment made by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development's venture capital investment program in BasharSoft, an Egyptian developer and operator of online employment sites.

Having led BasharSoft's Series B round two years ago, the Bank is back again, this time investing another $4 million in the business. The business operates two core employment platforms, Wuzzuf and Forasna. Wuzzuf caters to the country’s white-collar employer and employee markets while Forasna caters to the blue-collar employee market which makes up more than 65% of Egypt's total active workforce. Between them, the platforms have helped some 4 million users look for jobs at 50,000 companies.

TLcom Capital is making the first fintech deal on behalf of the $71 million Tide Africa Fund. The $1 million pre-seed deal in Nigeria-based Okra is being structured as a convertible debt investment which will convert into preferred equity at the startup’s next round. The firm will use the capital to build out its team and operations to meet the rapidly growing demand for its solutions which has jumped 175% since March alone.

In neighbouring Ghana, digital retail management startup Sumundi has landed an investment from GreenTec Capital Partners. The investment is GreenTec’s first in Ghana, and sixth on the continent overall. The venture capital firm has been particularly busy in 2020, backing another three startups since the beginning of the year.

The International Fund for Agricultural Development or IFAD is investing $9 million in the Agri-Business Capital Fund (or ABC Fund), a blended capital impact fund launched late last year. It's the first commitment to a private sector entity for IFAD which adopted a strategy to engage to private sector last year. Ultimately the fund, which is managed by Bamboo Capital Partners, aims to raise a total of €200 million or about $225 million to make equity or small debt investments in rural SMEs, farmers’ organizations, ‘agri-preneurs’, and rural financial institutions in Africa.

In people move news, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation announced the appointment of the new agency’s first Chief Risk Officer last week. Alice Miller took up the reins of her new role in April, joining the institution from another of the U.S. government agencies, the Millenium Challenge Corporation.

And finally, we published the seventh excerpt from KudosAfrica's 2020 ImpactAfrica report. Jeanne Fourie, Head of Sustainability and Ethics at Liberty Group South Africa, outlines the company's approach to integrating ESG principles in its operations.

That's it for this week. As always, you can review these and other stories by clicking through to this week's preview edition of the newsletter.

Allan Cunningham

Allan Cunningham is a senior media executive who has spent the last 15 years of his career working for some of the world’s most respected M&A and Private Equity media companies including Dow Jones’s publications Private Equity Analyst and VentureWire and most recently, The Deal. He has built a number of successful digital and event content businesses, both subscription and sponsor-supported, delivering information and content-marketing services to clients in the M&A and broader deal ecosystem. He recently struck out on his own and launched Rowayton Press, a multi-platform media company focused on the private capital opportunities in emerging and frontier markets. Mr. Cunningham holds a Bachelors degree from Liverpool John Moores University in the UK.

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