International Finance Corporation

But every dollar in the fund comes from either development lenders or the state.

Besides the European Investment Bank, the backers include the EBRD, the IFC, and the Egyptian American Enterprise Fund.

Mohamed Mahgoub, who's Tenmia's managing partner, has flagged that as a problem himself.

He's arguing that our private equity market won't grow up until local pension funds and insurers start writing some checks of their own.

Within APAC itself, we're doing a lot more diligence around greenfield investments, where there's bank financing.

When there's bank financing, they require us to follow the IFC, International Finance Corporation, performance standards, or a particular bank's environment, social and governance standards.

It might be World Bank, it might be Asian Development Bank, and so forth.

So traditional diligence is really around local regulations and measuring that site against those local regulations.

And again, We are in talks with the Ministry of Communications.

We have the Ghana Digital Acceleration Project, which seeks to, together with the IFC, International Finance Corporation, establish the Technology Innovation Fund.

And this fund also will be dedicated to supporting tech startups particularly in agritech and climate smart interventions and what have you.

So these are, of course, funds that we are establishing now and we are in talks with the partners that be to support Ghana's economy.

And so be it even in agriculture, agribusiness sector, be it in education, in health, in manufacturing, technology plays a constant role to help scale the business.

And so yes, you may need to have the tech startups run effectively run as tested models commercially to make returns and in turn also support other sectors so you have for instance a cassava farm that venture capital transfer may have funded and that cassava farm leverages on technology for its let's say supply chain management whatsoever i mean it's a downhill for us so Our portfolio is diversified.

It is now that we are talking about the Technology Innovation Fund in partnership with the Ministry of Communications under the IFC, that's the Ghana Digital Acceleration Project, which would be dedicated to supporting tech setups.

But even with that, we are looking at startups within the agri space, for instance, or agri-tech, ed-tech, and what have you.

He spoke to Joy Business on the sidelines of ESG Roundtable for Development Partners in Accra.

The International Finance Corporation is calling for stronger succession planning among family-owned businesses to ensure their long-term survival and sustainability.

Speaking at the ESG Roundtable for Development Partners, Acting ESG Advisory Lead for Africa at the IFC, Moez Miao warned that many family businesses fail during leadership transitions because succession planning is often treated as a transfer of ownership rather than a comprehensive governance process.

The

fact that the successors are not prepared enough, are not well prepared, not well educated, don't have the capabilities, don't have the knowledge about the business, not the background.

The objective is to share some of the good practices that the top performing family businesses have implemented and that turned out to be very successful to manage succession events in terms of having the right governance mechanisms in place, not only within the family, such as a family constitution, family rules, family council, for the family to have a platform to discuss and agree on events that are important to them, but also the right governance structures within the business with independent views, independent perspectives, to help the family take the right decisions and to help drive the business.

Also speaking

at the event, senior country officer at the IFC, Ioan Degiwa, highlighted a significant contribution of family-owned businesses to employment creation and economic development in

I'm being hired as White House press secretary and not White House counsel.

Well, I was the outside counsel for the World Bank and the IFC in the international division of Jonglin Law Firm.

I'm Noah Feldman.

I'm a professor at Harvard Law School.

Yes, and I think it is this World Bank Group crisis or scandal over the summer of 2026 that prompted us to have this discussion about the systemic issues within microfinance and this financial inclusion umbrella.

So, just to recap, the IFC Board of Directors took this unprecedented step when they officially overruled the findings of their own independent watchdog, the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman or CAO, regarding severe human rights harms and forced land sales tied to IFC-funded microfinance institutions in Cambodia.

The board declared that they have found no policy non-compliance, and they said that the end borrowers fall outside of the IFC sustainability framework.

As a result, the CAO Director General Janine Ferretti resigned.

Some say it's in protest.

incredible.

Yeah, but that's what the microfinance lending system did to Cambodia.

Now, not surprisingly, the World Bank's IFC was part of financing the lenders in Cambodia who provided these loans.

And still more to go.

I've been doing some work in Asia and the Pacific and working with different banks from three different countries, working in a project with the International Finance Corporation, where we've been trying to show them, here's the ways your products and services are being manipulated and misused and weaponized in the context of financial abuse.

And that's been so interesting because a lot of people They've said, oh, we've seen this before, but we didn't ever know that it was called financial abuse.

And so that language has been really important.