Last week in brief...Deal activity in North Africa took a lot of the limelight in Africa's private capital markets. The biggest transaction of the week was the completion of a deal that had been first announced in April. CI Capital, a Cairo-based investment house led a group of investors buying a majority stake in Taaleem Management Services, a higher education platform, from Thebes Education Management, a co-investment vehicle owned by several global institutional investors and DFIs. Taleem operates Nahda University in Beni Suef, the largest private university in Upper Egypt with an enrollment in excess of 5,600 students.
In Morocco, the red fruits subsidiary of Palmagri, a unit of Palmeraie Holdings Group, has a new shareholder. Tana Africa Capital, an evergreen investment company co-owned by Mary Oppenheimer Daughters of South Africa and Temasek, is buying a minority stake in the business and taking a seat on its board of directors. As part of the deal, Tana Africa will be able to nominate a director to join the company’s board, although who that will be, has not yet been disclosed. According to reports, Morocco’s red fruits industry has posted explosive growth recently, with exports jumping 48% in 2018 on the prior year. The country exports the majority of its red fruits production to European Union countries.
Back in Egypt, LimeVest Partners' new evergreen healthcare investment vehicle is being backed by the U.S. government's DFI, OPIC. It's the first deal with an Egyptian private equity firm for the institution which is providing LimeVest's LVP Health Holding with $10 million. Businesses that improve healthcare for people in Egypt, particularly women and children, top the list of investees for the investment platform.
Development Partners International or DPI announced an investment on behalf of its latest fund last week. Africa Development Partners III is backing Channel VAS in a secondary private equity transaction alongside Convergence Partners. Channel VAS is a financial tech firm with proprietary technology to assess consumer and small business credit-worthiness to make micro or nano cash loans, handset loans and airtime/data loans. Through its existing partnerships with more than 27 mobile network operators, the company serves over 650 million mobile subscribers who live and work across Africa, the Middle East, Asia.
Having received unconditional approval from the Competition Authority of Kenya earlier in September, Adenia Partners has completed the deal to acquire a majority stake in Kenyan supermarket chain Quick Mart. The transaction is being done through Adenia’s special purpose vehicle, Sokoni Retail Kenya, making Quick Mart the second Kenyan supermarket chain to be acquired by Sokoni following a deal for a controlling stake in Tumaini Self Service last December. Both companies will be integrated and operate under the Quick Mart brand.
In fund news, GML Capital and the Trade & Development Bank (TDB) have joined forces for the first time to launch a new trade finance fund, the Eastern and Southern African Trade Fund. With TDB’s profile and GML Capital’s network of global emerging market investors, the fund expects to raise additional capital from institutional investors based in or with significant knowledge of the Eastern and Southern African regions. ESATAL, the co-owned fund management entity, will initially look to attract trade finance specialist investors, African pension fund and insurance company capital, as well as Asian investors who have an appetite for emerging market specialist private lending products.
The IFC has announced that it is backing the Anaca Seed Fund, Flat6Lab Tunisia’s accelerator and early-stage fund with $1 million. The investment, half of which is being provided by the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative, will be used by the fund to invest in opportunities presented by Tunisia’s technology eco-system, with an emphasis on backing those launched by women entrepreneurs. The fund, which is increasing the amount of capital under management to $10 million, is aiming to invest in up to 100 Tunisian startups.
And finally, the U.S. Senate has confirmed the appointment of the first chief executive for the new U.S. International Development Finance Corporation or US DFC. Adam Boehler will lead the new government agency, which was created following the passage of the Better Utilization of Investments Leading to Development or BUILD Act into law last year.
In his new role, Boehler heads up a significant new source of finance for emerging markets as well as an important U.S. foreign policy tool. The BUILD Act has doubled the investment cap for the US DFC to $60 billion, added equity investments to its mandate for the first time and new financial tools to help mobilize private capital more effectively.
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 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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