Prospero is transforming Zambia into a regional impact investment hub for Central and Southern Africa by leveraging commercial capital for positive social and environmental outcomes. We do this by strengthening the impact investing ecosystem, working closely with different ecosystem players including businesses, investors, regulators, financial intermediaries, and impact investing enablers such as the national advisory board on impact investments.
In order to remove bottlenecks, Prospero focuses on:
- Improving the access to Capital. Lack of capital is a significant constraint for growth businesses. The high cost and stringent requirements make it difficult for companies across different sectors to acquire the requisite investment for expansion
- Boosting partner Capacity. Poor governance and management capacity make many local high growth businesses unattractive for investment, limiting their ability to raise funds for expansion
- Helping establish strategic Connections. Zambian businesses don’t often belong to networks that connect them to investors or other providers of appropriate financial services. A limited number of quality service providers that can support businesses to become investor-ready means many SMEs requiring these services cannot access them.
- Ensuring Compliance levels. SMEs struggle to comply with investors and other financiers’ regulations and expectations. There are also specific areas of compliance within their respective sectors that SMEs struggle to meet.
Initiatives
Prospero increases impact investment into Zambian registered businesses seeking growth capital by assisting SMEs to get investment ready and link them to appropriate impact investors. All businesses need to be post revenue and looking to raise between $250K to $10m. Our partners possess wide investment experience and have access to a pool of impact investors and or are impact investors themselves. There is currently a long running partnership with Impact Capital Africa (ICA) while opportunities for further partnerships with both local and regional partners are being explored.
Institutional capacity of early-stage local fund managers is built to attract requisite capital for deployment into local businesses. Our partners under this initiative are local venture capital funds and private equity firms.
An increase in the capital flow to early stage/start-up businesses through establishing and working with Zambia’s first angel network. The network consists of high-net-worth individuals that invest and provide mentorship for early-stage businesses.
Through partnering with various players Prospero aims to strengthen the Zambian impact investment ecosystem. All players fall within the five GSG pillars namely supply (investors), intermediaries (financial institutions), demand (businesses), enablers (promoters of impact investment), and policy/regulation networks. Our main partner here is the Zambian National Advisory Board on Impact investment (NABII).