“We were looking for female founders, but the business itself and the experience of the founder, irrespective of gender, was a huge pull for us,” said Tokunboh. “Putting the female angle aside, we look at four key things: management, opportunities, return potential and the exit alternatives.”
Adds Polo, “Chika’s impact story was really great, the market was evident, the size of the opportunity was evident. Chika is a great entrepreneur, very dynamic. She understands what she is doing. She is hungry.”
Driving gender diversity in Africa
Alitheia IDF invests in and grows small and medium-sized enterprises led by gender-diverse teams to achieve solid financial returns and tangible social impact in Africa. The fund invests in sectors that engage a significant percentage of women, as entrepreneurs, producers, distributors or consumers. These sectors include agribusiness, consumer goods, health, education, creative industries, and financial and business services. Located in Lagos and Johannesburg, Alitheia invests in six countries: Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Lesotho.
In 2008, when Tokunboh and Polo started Alitheia IDF, which is a joint venture between Alitheia Capital in Nigeria and IDF Capital in South Africa, they were determined to back women-owned businesses, because they knew that there were many women on the continent whose businesses could grow with the right funding.
“One of the first drivers was when I realised that much of the capital that I was deploying was going to male founders and male-run businesses in male-dominated industries,” Tokunboh says. “I sat in rooms where I was the only woman investor, surrounded by male-founded investee companies, and I thought, ‘That cannot be because female founders do not exist’. So I dug and found that the numbers played to the fact that diversity does drive superior performance, better corporate governance, greater innovation.”
About 40% of businesses in sub-Saharan Africa are women-owned, but less than 10% of these businesses are able to raise funding from traditional financiers. “We often say that traditional investors are leaving money on the table, because they are much more comfortable backing people that look like them, work like them, talk like them, and hang out in the same places,” adds Polo.