Impact at Mbuyu Capital
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The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals provide a useful framework to consider impact.  Africa offers many opportunities to support these goals.  We focus specifically on:
  • Reducing poverty (#1) by creating jobs and raising incomes to enable children to go to school, to pay for healthcare, and generally improve quality of life
  • Doing this in a lasting and sustainable way (#8) by enabling companies to grow and implementing robust environmental, social and governance practices at those companies
  • Improving availability of nutritious food (#2) and addressing Africa’s net food imports by increasing local production, yields, processing and distribution
  • Ensuring responsible and sustainable consumption and production of food and other materials (#12) by investee companies
  • Addressing climate action (#13) and life on land (#15) to avoid or reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote sustainable production methods for agricultural commodities.


​Mbuyu Capital's 5-Step Impact Approach
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We select companies and fund investments using a five-step approach:
  1. Avoiding doing harm: no impact-negative sectors such as extracting, producing or burning fossil fuels
  2. Investing in sectors with good business opportunities (high demand, profitable product delivery and ability to establish or maintain a moat) and real social benefit such as renewable energy, access to finance, food and agribusiness, affordable healthcare and education, and the infrastructure for delivery
  3. Within these sectors select the companies with the most sustainable financial performance
  4. Invest in those companies with the most appropriate balance for the client between expected return and impact
  5. After investment, add value by implementing additional impact initiatives.

Measuring Impact
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Impact means many things to many people.  Mbuyu Capital uses a Theory of Change, which provides a rigorous framework for assessing and measuring impact.
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We measure what we achieve through the quantitative Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) related to the Theory of Change:
  • Inputs:  the capital we invest, the capital this leverages from other investors and grant-makers
  • Outputs:  the direct result of our investment over and above what would have happened anyway
  • First order effects:  the consequence for beneficiaries of the products and services our investee produces
  • Second order effects:  the consequences for the supply chain of our investment, the environment and other secondary consequences.