Invest in women. Invest in climate. Create long-term prosperity.
Mission
AMF’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.
Vision
Economic transformation where SMEs in Africa and Latin America can scale sustainably and create well-paid jobs.
What We Do
AMF supports SMEs across Africa and Latin America through the following specific activities:
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.
Specific services we offer include providing gender and climate-based technical assistance to SMEs. We also collect and disseminate data on GLIC to build up the field more broadly.
Theory of Change
Our Journey to Date
2016:
- AMF was founded
2018:
- AMF became operational
- Co-created the G-SEARCh consortium
2020:
- Completed the Powering Agriculture program, funded by USAID
2021:
- Launched the WE4F program, funded by GIZ
- Launched the DeveloPPP program, funded by DEG
2022:
- Adopted new corporate strategy
- Launched a partnership with SEAF (as a sub-contractor) to implement the Tanzania Catalytic Innovation Fund, funded by SDC
“To include workers of both sexes shows us that we are an inclusive business. It’s an opportunity for us. Diversity of opinion helps the business.”
— Villa Andina Management (AMF SME partner)
