Womvest Ventures is an investment entity that attempts to offer purpose-driven and flexible funding for women-owned and managed businesses. Womvest is a network of women in the investing ecosystem producing shared value for one another via cooperation and mentorship.
Womvest was founded a year ago with the goal of enabling and supporting women’s engagement in the investing ecosystem, whether they are professionals, entrepreneurs, or investors, by offering access and exposure to smart and ambitious women. The Womvest Mentorship Matching Program takes place twice a year and also organises networking events for its members.
Womvest Ventures has teamed with Secha Capital, a South African-based private equity impact fund, to establish its impact-linked lending facility as its first investment opportunity.
The programme provides short-term, impact-linked financing to Secha’s portfolio of women-led small and growing companies (SGBs) who are having difficulty obtaining working capital at reasonable rates and conditions.
The impact-linked mechanism of the instrument rewards businesses for timely repayment rather than penalising them, and financially incentivizes the completion of pre-determined social impact milestones.
“How investment capital is structured directly affects behaviours and outcomes – it can reinforce existing negative behaviours or incentivise positive behaviours for all stakeholders. This facility has been designed to provide impact-linked capital that works for the women it supports whilst delivering a competitive financial return to investors,” said Maya Burney, founder of Womvest.
A group of women investors from the Womvest network seeded the facility. Secha Capital’s managing director, Brendan Mullen, said his firm was open to innovative ways of assisting its portfolio firms on their growth paths.
“We have seen first-hand the struggle in accessing affordable short-term capital for SGBs. This facility directly addresses a gap in the market whilst embedding specific impact outcomes,” he said.
