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In episode 50 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Ladé Araba, Executive Director of AlphaMundi Foundation(AMF), on investing in women and climate to create long-term jobs and prosperity.

Ladé Araba is a senior Development Finance Executive and Board Member with over 20 years of experience. Prior to becoming the Executive Director of the AlphaMundi Foundation, she was the Managing Director for Africa at Convergence Blended Finance.

She also sits on the Equality Fund’s Investment Advisory Council, serves as a Non Executive Director on the Board of African Risk Capacity (ARC) Ltd, is the Co-Founder/President of the Visiola Foundation, and was an Advisory Committee Member at the Green Outcomes Fund.

She previously served as Technical Adviser to the former Minister of Finance of Nigeria and was the Head of the Strategic Monitoring Unit. She was also an Adviser in the Power Sector Team at the Nigeria Infrastructure Advisory Facility (NIAF).

She was previously a Senior Investment Officer in Infrastructure Finance at the African Development Bank and served as Technical Adviser to the Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Ms. Araba was an Enterprise Development Specialist at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and also worked for the QED Group LLC in Washington, DC.

She holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from Thunderbird School of Global Management and a dual Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) degree in Management Information Systems (MIS) and International Business from the University of Oklahoma (2001). A native English speaker, she is fluent in French and Italian and has basic knowledge of Spanish.

About AlphaMundi Foundation

AlphaMundi Foundation's mission is to strengthen the long-term commercial viability of SMEs in Africa and Latin America to drive economic transformation. This leads to more jobs and income generation benefiting more people and in turn, increased purchasing power and improved qualities of life.

The vision: Economic transformation where SMEs in Africa and Latin America can scale sustainably and create well-paid jobs.

What they do:

Structured blended finance

Access to capital and technical assistance are two of the biggest barriers to businesses getting off the ground. We're willing to take the risk and invest in these impactful SMEs. We do this by offering SMEs with investments that may have lower returns and/or higher risks through measures like technical assistance grants, first loss guarantees, returnable pre-investment stage grants, concessional loans, and/or scaling capital. All of this is done with the expectation that these investments will be truly catalytic and more likely to bring strong social and environmental rewards.

GLIC field building

We believe gender and climate issues can't be addressed on an ad-hoc basis. Rather, these complex challenges require an intentional approach, which brings explicit gender and climate solutions into all investment decisions. Over recent years, gender lens investing has gained traction, although as global temperatures rise, the demand for climate investing will only continue to increase. That's how we came to coining a new term: GLIC—Gender Lens Investing for Climate.

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