Grace Ashiru
The African Guarantee Fund (AGF), a market-friendly guarantee program that aims to make it easier for small businesses in Africa to get financing, has teamed up with better vest, a crowdfunding platform based in Frankfurt, to make it easier to fund sustainable SMEs projects in Africa.
The AGF was created and is supported by the AfDB in partnership with the governments of Spain and Denmark. Its goal is to offer financial guarantees to financial institutions to encourage them to lend money to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and use their potential to create growth for everyone in the region.
CEO of AGF Group Jules Ngankam said of the new partnership, “Partnering with a crowdfunding platform and Fintech is in line with our strategy for the next few years and is a unique chance for innovative financing to grow.” Through our risk-sharing mechanism, our partnership with bettervest will help Africa make the transition to a greener economy.
By working with the African Guarantee Fund, we’ve come a long way toward our goal of giving our investors the valuable tool of a default guarantee as well, which could lead to more investments on the African continent. The CEO of bettervest GmbH, Marilyn Heib, says that this partnership is a big step for the company.
Through this partnership, we hope to make impact investing, which is good for the environment and for people as a whole, even more popular.Like any other type of investment, impact investing has risks. The loss of the invested money is the worst-case scenario in the event of a project failure. Due to the partial guarantee provided by the African Guarantee Fund, the risk of default will be decreased.
