Investing at the Edge of Market Formation – Anne-Marie Chidzero

Anne-Marie, I'd love to hear a little bit about your journey into the investment industry.

Just give me a brief overview of where you've been up to this point.

Oh, wow.

Thank you.

It's a long history, a long journey, which really started, gosh, three decades ago.

And certainly the challenges have evolved and are different or more complex.

But I started my journey at the World Bank working with CGAP.

So I was part of the team.

For those of you that don't know CGAP, it was an initiative that was established in the early 90s to support the growth of microfinance or microcredit.

At that time, we were talking about microcredit, given the fantastic work that Grameen Bank and others in Asia had been pioneering to scale the access of low-income poor households to financial services.

So I was part of the team that established that.

It was a multi-donor effort to really look at how do you scale these solutions

in emerging markets.

You know, fast forward, I was in Washington, D.C., I moved to Zimbabwe and then subsequently to South Africa and started working on more complex issues to do with financial sector development.

So it's not just about backing a particular product or solution, but it's really looking at how does the African financial sector function? expand in order not only to be inclusive, but it's really enabling diversification in terms of the products and institutions.

And, you know, what are the challenges, what are the problems we're facing in building a market? You know, markets need information, market needs players, and markets need actors.

And And markets need sort of foundations upon which they establish themselves, you know, the rules of the game.

So I started working with the financial sector deepening programs that were funded at that time by the UK government's development agency, DFID.

And then I also did some private investment, managed the sort of wind down of a private equity fund in microfinance, you know, which really brought me to different corners of the African continent working with with microfinance institutions and really establishing them as an asset class.

And then was the founding partner for the first Pan-African gender lens private equity funds, investing in women-led businesses called Aletheia IDF.

So joined Tukumu Ismail and Polo Leteka Mau in establishing that fund.

They were very successful in raising $100 million.

So that was a first for the African continent.

And then, you know, just as our markets change, and I think that's very important if you're working in sort of supporting market growth, they will change.

And so for... facilitators, development finance institutions, it's very important that we keep up with those changes.