Last week in brief... Two adjectives to describe this week's wrap of private capital investment activity in Africa would be short and sweet. As you will see from below, we only report on three deals, all of them at the smaller end of the scale. The was no fundraising news to speak of, although a new fund did announce the name of its investment committee Chair. And for perspectives, we did find a couple of divergent items related to the IMF's recent report on private investment trends in sub-Saharan Africa.
But first, the deals. The biggest of the week saw Cellulant, a digital payments provider, raise $47.5 million from a group of investors led by the TPG Growth-managed Rise Fund. They were joined by Endeavor Catalyst, Satya Capital, Velocity Capital and Progression Africa for what is the largest transaction to date for an African fintech and payments business. Both Velocity and Progression had participated in Cellulant's earlier rounds.
The Consonance Kuramo Special Opportunities Fund is taking an equity stake in real estate platform Century Development.The undisclosed investment will help support a number of Century's planned investments, which total some $200 million over the next five years. The developers are aiming to create a portfolio of real estate assets in the education, affordable housing, industrial warehousing and healthcare sectors in East Africa.
The Moringa Fund announced its sixth investment last week, backing a Togolese company developing a juice processing factory. The private equity impact investment fund is making an investment in Jus Délice, a producer of fruit juices supplied by a large network of growers who use organic practices.
The capital will be used to help build the planned juice processing plant as well invest in the company's growth plans for its supplier network. In addition, the fund will provide technical assistance to the producers in order to boost their agroforestry models.
Bayakha Investment Partners has made it back into the news again this week. The South African infrastructure fund manager firm has appointed Ben Kodisang as Chair of its investment committee. He has held senior roles in several of the leading financial services institutions on the continent including Sanlam, Stanlib and Old Mutual.
As you may recall, Bayakha recently launched the raise for their Transformational Infrastructure Fund which is aiming to land commitments of R2 billion or approximately $160 million to make equity and empowerment financing or structured equity investments in socio-economic infrastructure projects primarily in South Africa.
In other people moves news, Actis has appointed the former head of investor relations at UK-based Sovereign Capital to head up fundraising and investor relations across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Virginia Doble joins the growth markets investor in the newly-created role, based in London, and will report directly to Neil Brown, a partner and the global head of Actis's investor development group.
Finally, while the IMF's latest edition of the "Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa" shows that private investment growth slowed or turned negative in a majority of sub-Saharan countries in 2015-2016, TLG Capital's Zhi Yong Heng discusses in a podcast his view that private investment in sub-Saharan Africa is now set to explode.
As always, you can review these and other stories by clicking through to this week’s preview issue of Africa Capital Digest.
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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