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    Africa: A Network That Never Asks for Money Moved $100 Million Last Year – One of Its Busiest Corridors Runs Through Africa

    ElanBy No Comments5 Mins Read
    Africa: A Network That Never Asks for Money Moved 0 Million Last Year – One of Its Busiest Corridors Runs Through Africa

    In a RootsToFoods Capital Series interview continuing Wave 2 of the series, Michael Meehan, founder of the Forum for Impact and former chief executive of the Global Reporting Initiative, argues that capital corridors are not built from scratch. They are recognized, then organized, and some of the most active ones now connect the Gulf, Europe and East and Central Africa.

    Ovidiu Bujorean, chief executive officer of OviBees Ventures, spoke with Michael Meehan, founder of the Forum for Impact and former chief executive of the Global Reporting Initiative, as Wave 2 of the RootsToFoods Capital Series continued. Meehan’s argument: the deployment gap this series has been mapping is not only a conditions problem or an instrument problem. It is also a connectivity problem, and closing it depends on trusted corridors and curated networks as much as on capital or mechanisms.

    Meehan has spent 23 years recognizing where those corridors run rather than building them from nothing, starting with one of the first carbon trading systems in Silicon Valley, through the Global Reporting Initiative’s sustainability standards (now embedded in China’s Belt and Road strategy and Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030), to the Forum for Impact, the invite-only network he founded to help family offices and institutional investors move capital together.


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    “It wasn’t really building a corridor, it was recognizing where the corridors are. That’s what carbon trading was, twenty-five years ago. That’s what the UAE’s $70 billion investment into Canada is right now. Recognizing the flows, not necessarily building them yourself.”

    Michael Meehan, Founder, Forum for Impact

    The Forum for Impact now connects more than 1,000 family offices, high-net-worth investors and institutional leaders across nine countries. It is invite-only, pitches nothing and raises capital for no one, yet it mobilized roughly $100 million within its network last year by asking for nothing at all. The mechanism is peer matching, not fundraising: a family office already committed to an issue, climate philanthropy or women in finance among them, gets introduced to the six or seven others worldwide already doing the same work, so no one has to build the coalition alone.

    Where the network convenes follows a pattern. Its dialogues on the Central and East Africa to Europe corridor have run in Nairobi and Geneva; its dialogues on the Gulf to Canada corridor have run in Jeddah, Abu Dhabi, Toronto and Banff. The venues move each year to follow where capital and opportunity meet.

    A generational shift is reinforcing the pattern, Meehan said. Family offices led by a younger generation increasingly treat impact as core investment strategy rather than philanthropy, a change he ties to nearly $400 billion sitting in U.S. donor-advised funds, of which roughly 95% has not yet been deployed. The UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association, which Meehan chaired, has influenced more than $11 trillion in assets toward sustainability goals, evidence, he said, of how far standard-setting alone can move capital.

    Not every corridor is working as intended. Reviewing one Gulf sovereign wealth fund’s portfolio, Meehan’s team found that 80% of the holdings working against the fund’s own country’s public climate commitments sat in carbon and clean energy projects, and 80% of those sat in Africa: capital actively undermining the climate pledges its own government had made internationally. In July, Meehan is traveling to Angola to address the heads of Africa’s sovereign wealth funds directly on the same misalignment problem, which he says shows up in some of their own portfolios too.

    The blocker beneath most of this, Meehan said, is trust rather than capital. Canada’s roughly $1 billion a year in public ocean investment has no blended-finance vehicle to pull in matching private or philanthropic capital, so it goes unmatched. And in non-OECD countries, opportunities below roughly $1 billion, the scale at which most African projects sit, stall on trust and transparency even where blended-finance capital exists in theory. It is the same problem FSD Africa, where Meehan advises and where Wave 2 guest Dr. Frannie Léautier chairs the board, was set up to address.

    Asked when a family office is genuinely ready to move from dialogue to deployment, Meehan’s answer was blunt: “They see someone else doing it.”