Emerald Africa Financing Facility

Emerald Africa Financing Facility provides debt to early-stage digital innovators based in sub-Saharan Africa that are enabling greater access to finance for rural SMEs.

In recent years there has been an increase in venture capital being deployed in Africa, including to intermediaries that are enabling greater access and reach of finance to a range of digital innovators bringing new services and products to African markets. They often provide embedded credit and working capital, but due to the lack of debt to fund their activities, the on-lending is funded through ever-diluted equity. Emerald Africa’s solution is to provide early-stage loans for on-lending, to help ventures show they can be viable and reach the next hurdle to access scaling finance from others in the ecosystem, including banks and other investors.

Small Foundation is incubating Emerald Africa, initially as a two year pilot, to establish the viability of providing debt finance to early-stage agtechs in sub-Saharan Africa. Emerald Africa’s goal is to see a thriving and well-funded ecosystem around rural focused SMEs across Africa.

As of August 2024 Emerald Africa had five companies in its investment portfolio.

Blog posts:
Small Foundation launches facility to support digital innovators

Practice area: Investments
Investment years: 2023-2024
Region: Africa