Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes

Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes is the Founder and CEO of Aruwa Capital Management. Quotes We intentionally are looking to address the access to the capital gap for women in Africa as consumers and entrepreneurs as well as to reduce unemployment in our markets by providing growth capital to underfunded and overlooked companies. Generating strong financial returns whilst delivering positive and long-term social impact alongside tangible and measurable women empowerment outcomes. Enabling job creation for underrepresented groups as well as access to capital for overlooked underfunded women in Africa. We are deliberately integrating gender analysis into our investment analysis and decision-making. Access to capital for women and people of colour in my view is one of the most important dislocations in the private equity and venture capital industry that needs to be addressed in the next decade. There is a huge gap between intention to do impact investing, and the actual action. So I am hoping that this gap closes in the coming decade and that we have institutions putting money where their mouth is in terms of addressing racial inequities as well as unconscious biases women face. Overcoming the misconception that to be an impact fund you have to sacrifice returns for positive social impact remains to be one of the biggest challenges. Mainstreaming impact investing and integrating gender analysis and ESG as part of the investment process and not only reserving this for impact funds will be where we will need to get to as an industry as a whole globally. We need to continue to showcase the success stories of impact investing where intentionality around impact actually enhances returns, this will be key in helping impact investing to become more mainstream. Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes: The impact of women empowerment It’s a business that we remain very, very excited about in terms of the growth trajectory. The way that they’ve been able to create this ecosystem that is really enabling the informal economy to really scale and have access to finance. The unit economics of these centres are just phenomenal. You set up a centre and it breaks even in a short space of time. We think that if you’re able to provide affordable, high-quality healthcare services, like diagnostics, in peri-urban areas so outside the big cities you are really able to position yourself in an industry with limited competition. Fundraising is not for the faint-hearted. *Getting global institutions to back you, back your firm, back your vision, back your strategy. It takes time, it takes years of building trust, years of communication, years of follow-ups. When you finally get them, it’s very, very fulfilling. You’re fundraising for one fund, you’re deploying another fund, you’re exiting another fund, you’re hiring, you’re reporting, you’re doing investor relations. Sometimes I feel there aren’t enough hours in the day. Sometimes I feel like I need three of me. Behind the scenes of building a private equity firm in Nigeria External links Category:Entrepreneurs Category:Businesswomen from Nigeria Category:Living people Category:Women from Nigeria