Why gender lens investing in Africa needs a localised, participatory approach: an interview with Andia Chakava

Andia Chakava is the Investment Director at the Graca Machel Trust, a Pan African organisation that deals with women's and children's rights through a gender lens investment vehicle and other programmes. We spoke to her about regional gender and JEDI nuances on the continent, the importance of working with local women’s networks, and the Trust’s participatory investment processes.

Tell us more about the specific gender and JEDI nuances in your work and region.

This is a fund targeted at indigenous African women across the continent, starting with East and South Africa. Building the fund helped me be more aware of some of the regional nuances, as well as some of the country differences. Africa is very diverse. It has a colonial background; some parts are English speaking, some parts are French speaking, and some parts speak Portuguese. And almost every one of them has different relationships with the parties that colonised them, and [different] cultural attitudes that were formed. 

The African continent also has ethnicities, and some of these transcend country barriers. So you might find the Maasai in both Kenya and Tanzania. You will also find the Shona in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Kenya, for example. So some of the boundaries that were created were artificially drawn, with similarities across them. As an investor, this means that just being an African or being a woman does not automatically mean that I understand the nuances on the ground. So how do we work with that? We have a network strategy, we have about 17 networks in the African continent, and we've been building these networks from the ground up. So in countries where they already have women's associations, we don't try and reinvent the wheel, we help those existing associations to strengthen themselves. But if a sector has been marginalised, or is quite male dominated, or needs our added support, we can also actually create the network for women to convene. We've done this for women in the media, and women in finance. So why are the networks important? 

Working in Africa is very participatory. You need feedback from people on the ground in terms of the local context. Just because you have managed to execute something in one particular country, it does not necessarily mean that you can take the same package and make it into a regional project. Because the countries are so different and not all of them are part of regional blocks [with common characteristics and cultures]. 

Are there any examples of investments to help illustrate that?

We do all of our work through networks, and we put the countries at the heart of the solution. There are a couple of investments that we have done both in Zambia and in Kenya. We worked very closely with the women's groups there to identify the source of the problem, and also support with the quality of the pipeline, because with due diligence not everything shows up in the documents that you're given. There's a lot of informal discussions about the integrity of the entrepreneur that you're working with, the track record, what's actually happening on the ground in the sector. 

Within our investment process, because we're a thin team, we're still in the process of fundraising. So we created two types of screening: a first level screening on a country basis, where we get local parties to give us input on a particular deal. That's the only time it comes forward. Then we can put it through a more technical gender alignment screening. The main point there is making sure that we're not appearing to be the experts. 

This diversity doesn't only exist on a country level. For instance, we have noticed that despite being Africans, and despite being on the continent, we don't really have any structured mechanisms for engaging women in the informal sector. And that's because a lot of these businesses are not registered, they are home based, and it's become even harder to reach them, especially during COVID unless there's particular market days. So we're looking at the businesses that we are investing in, and the businesses that we're thinking of investing in and deliberately integrating the informal sector within the supply chain. A lot of women have been branching into manufacturing, where a lot of the raw materials can be sourced on a community basis and we find it more efficient, rather than us gathering that data ourselves, to work through and really support the companies with the ability to reach a lot of women across different socio-economic backgrounds. That's something we've had to be deliberate about. Because if we didn't specify it, then we might just be dealing with one particular class, and that's the class that maybe has the access to data, and the access to networks. We have to be able to recognise who is not in this room, and who is not able to be in this room because they don't have the privilege. How can our investment strategy also include them?

Any final pieces of advice or learnings for investors at an earlier stage in this work?

I think one of the reasons people don't take this approach is that it's hard work. Building relationships takes time. Especially since we might not be convening the way we used to. I would just challenge people when they do business in Africa, to also go beyond their original network, whether it’s a business school network or a consultancy network, and learn a bit more about the region they’re investing in. Even as a tourist. [This will help them] understand how patriarchy is playing out in an African context, in terms of different disclosures that businesses are willing to make, in terms of how they're run, the level of transparency or media exposure they want to have because of backlash within the community. It allows investors who are looking at technical assistance programs to support the success of the investment and drive value creation.