Hi Reader,

I'm a little embarrassed. For many of you this is the first time a newsletter has arrived from me in close to a year. I've broken all the rules of what the content gurus say about consistency, and I'll unashamedly put the blame at the door of busy-ness.

It's been a wild 2026 so far and we've been building some really interesting stuff with some even-more-interesting clients and partners. So I'll be sharing some fortnightly reflections on those builds, with some information about them at the same time, in the run to the end of the year.

So then, to the question that got you to open this email: who does actually care about African businesses?

I put that question to my own team a few weeks ago, in the middle of talking through a client. Not as a rhetorical line. As a test: does the ESG argument actually hold up once you trace it all the way to the end.

Take a plastic bread bag manufacturer, for example.

The manufacturer cares about itself, that's just where any business starts. The bread producer that buys those bags cares about the bag maker too, because that's what its bread ships in. The retailer selling the bread cares, because a supply problem two steps back is still their problem. The environmentalists worried about plastic waste are there too, but mostly somewhere else entirely, worrying about a version of the problem that doesn't look like this one.

So follow the money instead, alongside the transactional chain: there sits a Private Equity investor or asset manager. And behind them, an asset owner: a trust, pension fund or the like. And so we come full circle: the people buying the bread (and disposing of the bag once consumed, or hopefully reusing it) are then in play via their pensions.

So it's local ... local capital.

That's the whole argument in one chain. Most ESG frameworks were built in Europe, to answer European risk questions, for European capital. They get imported here as if the real question, who's actually asking and whose money is actually behind it, travels with them. It doesn't.

If you use someone else's framework to go looking for data, you'll only ever find what that framework was built to see.

But the businesses actually succeeding here have a broader footprint than that lens can register, because the capital behind them, the customers around them, and the risk they carry are all shaped locally, not imported.

One of my team said it better than I have here: our context is developing rather than developed, and being prescribed to by someone developed just means they're out of touch with what's actually in front of them.

How do we then navigate around this, the problem of being able to account for local operating realities and ensuring you manage risks and leverage impact opportunities, while being able to answer questions and provide data to stakeholders who may be looking at your business through a keyhole?