When Impact Investing Ghana began mapping Ghana’s pension ecosystem in 2021, the question it was trying to answer was deceptively simple: why was none of the country’s $7 billion in pension assets reaching the SMEs that employ the majority of Ghanaian workers; and how do you persuade the guardians of a nation’s retirement savings to back these businesses?
The answer, it turned out, had little to do with appetite and almost everything to do with architecture.
Five years later, in March 2026, Ci-Gaba — a $75 million blended finance fund-of-funds — reached its first close, with Ghanaian pension funds formally committing capital to private equity and debt vehicles for the first time in the country’s history. The milestone, modest in absolute terms against the scale of Africa’s financing needs, is being watched closely by pension regulators, development finance institutions and fund managers across the continent. Not because of its size, but because of how it was built.
The gap that wasn’t about money
Africa’s SME financing problem is well-documented. The International Finance Corporation estimates a $331 billion financing gap across the continent. Pension funds, meanwhile, hold over $600 billion in assets region-wide. The arithmetic looks simple. The institutional reality is not.
Less than 10% of African pension assets are allocated to productive sectors — private equity, infrastructure, private credit, or housing. The overwhelming majority sits in government securities. Pension trustees, operating under fiduciary obligations to beneficiaries, have historically lacked both the regulatory permission and the internal capacity to evaluate alternative asset classes. The vehicles designed to receive institutional capital have often been foreign-domiciled, dollar-denominated, and structured with timelines misaligned to pension liability profiles.
“The gap between these two realities is not primarily a capital problem,” the learning report published alongside Ci-Gaba’s first close states. “It is a design, governance, and capacity problem.”
That diagnosis shaped every subsequent decision.
Building the room before the negotiation
Impact Investing Ghana’s approach inverted the standard fundraising sequence. Rather than designing a fund and taking it to market, Ci-Gaba’s design team — led by IIGh CEO Amma Lartey and Savannah Impact Advisory CEO Hamdiya Ismaila — did not start with a financial product. They started with a series of structured dialogues, convened under the banner of a Pensions Industry Collaborative. The goal was not to pitch, but to listen. The organisation spent the first two years, from 2021 through 2022, on what it describes as ecosystem mapping: structured dialogues with pension trustees, engagement with the regulator, and an honest accounting of the fiduciary concerns blocking participation. Sessions covered fund economics, due diligence on underlying fund managers, and the mechanics of a fund-of-funds structure.
“This was not an add-on workshop series,” the report states. “It was the mechanism through which trustees gained the language and frameworks to evaluate alternative assets as a prudent option, not a speculative one.”
What emerged was a Pensions Industry Collaborative, drawing together major Ghanaian trustees including Stanbic Investment Management Services, Axis Pensions, Enterprise Trustees, Petra Trust and others, to develop a collective action plan for unlocking alternative asset allocation. The collaborative gave trustees a shared institutional context within which to engage with an unfamiliar asset class — and gave the fund design team direct access to the concerns it would need to resolve.
Stanbic Investment Management Services and Axis Pensions made commitments to Ci-Gaba before the fund’s catalytic investors had been secured. That sequencing matters: it meant the fund was not being sold to pension trustees but developed with them.
The structural choices that made the fiduciary argument
Three design decisions defined Ci-Gaba’s eventual structure, each directly traceable to the trustee engagement process.
The fund is denominated in Ghanaian cedis. This was not incidental. Ghanaian pension liabilities are cedi-denominated; a dollar-denominated vehicle would have introduced currency mismatch risk that trustees could not defend to beneficiaries. Local currency structuring eliminated the FX risk argument and aligned the fund’s profile with the pension system’s existing obligations.
Second, a first-loss catalytic capital layer was set at 30%. Development finance institutions and foundations — including FSD Africa Investments and Small Foundation — agreed to absorb the initial losses in the portfolio. The calibration was deliberate. A larger cushion might have removed too much market discipline; a smaller one would not have been enough to shift the risk-reward calculus for conservative allocators. The report describes this as “crowding in, not crowding out” domestic capital.
The vehicle was structured as open-ended, providing patient long-term capital suited to SME growth cycles rather than the compressed return timelines of conventional private equity.
Savannah Impact Advisory, a licensed Accra-based fund manager, was appointed to lead the structuring process, obtain regulatory approval and manage the fundraise. Its local licensing and relationships with the regulator were material — a foreign-domiciled manager would have faced a structurally different set of approval hurdles.
The grant architecture behind the close
Ci-Gaba’s first close required not one capital raise but two running in parallel: the fund itself, and a grants programme to finance the design, structuring and capacity-building work that made the fund possible.
The UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, via its RISA Fund, was the first major grant provider, financing the initial design and structuring work and what the report describes as “critical ecosystem strengthening initiatives.” GSG Impact provided subsequent grants and co-hosted investor roundtables. Ford Foundation, FMO via its Ventures and Market Creation programmes, the Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Argidius Foundation each provided additional grant support.
This sequencing — grants first, catalytic capital second, pension commitments third — is one of the report’s most explicit recommendations and one of its most direct departures from standard blended finance practice. Most blended vehicles secure concessional capital first and attempt to build institutional appetite around it. Ci-Gaba’s model argues this produces structures that are technically viable but institutionally brittle: pension trustees arrive at a vehicle designed without them, and the result is hesitation that grant capital alone cannot overcome.
The Technical Assistance Facility embedded within the fund served a related function. Rather than providing post-investment support to portfolio companies — the conventional TA model — Ci-Gaba’s facility was designed to connect pension trustees, fund managers, regulators and development partners into a shared coordination infrastructure during the fund’s design phase. Capacity building was delivered through Ghanaian case studies rather than generic curricula, a distinction the report emphasises as consequential for trustee mindset change.
What first close actually means
Ci-Gaba’s first close mobilised over $30 million in pension commitments, with Ghanaian funds described as on track to exceed that figure. The fund is deploying across Ghana, Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire, covering agribusiness, fintech, healthcare, clean energy, education and manufacturing.
The reported impact targets — 1,200 jobs supported, 48% women’s share of employment, 35% youth share — are projections for the deployment period, not achieved outcomes from a fund that reached first close three months ago. They should be read accordingly.
The more significant claim is structural. Ci-Gaba is, according to its sponsors, the first instance of Ghanaian pension funds investing in locally structured private equity and debt vehicles. If the deployment phase produces the return data the framework requires — the report explicitly identifies return data flowing back to pension funds as a prerequisite for future allocations — it establishes an evidence base that no amount of advocacy could substitute for.
The replication question
The framework extracted from the Ci-Gaba experience identifies six conditions for domestic pension capital mobilisation: pension fund availability and capacity; enabling policy and regulatory flexibility; investment-ready vehicles and SMEs; local leadership and collaboration; catalytic grants and capital; and capacity building and syndication. The conditions are interdependent — the framework’s argument is that partial interventions fail because the system requires all six to function simultaneously.
That interdependence is also what makes replication difficult. Ghana’s specific institutional context — a relatively consolidated pension industry, an existing regulatory framework for alternatives, and a nonprofit sponsor with deep trustee relationships — provided the conditions Ci-Gaba required. Nigeria’s PENCOM-regulated pension pool is substantially larger, at roughly $30 billion, but the regulatory environment for alternative asset allocation operates under different constraints. Kenya’s National Social Security Fund is undergoing structural reform. The UEMOA pension market in Francophone West Africa operates across a different currency and regulatory zone entirely.
The Ci-Gaba model does not transplant automatically. What it offers is a sequencing logic and a set of design principles that can be adapted — but only, the report is explicit, under local leadership with genuine institutional relationships. The framework’s most direct warning is against external actors attempting to replicate the structure without the embedded local knowledge that made it function.
“The framework makes clear that no single intervention is sufficient,” said Ismaila. “These elements interact. If you have catalytic capital but no local leadership, the structure collapses. If you have pension assets but no investable vehicles, nothing moves.”
Her co-author, Lartey, added: “This is not a blueprint you can import. It requires local institutions with the relationships and longevity to hold the process together through multiple design iterations, regulatory conversations, and market cycles.”
British High Commissioner to Ghana, Dr. Christian Rogg, acknowledged the UK’s role as an early funder, calling Ci-Gaba “part of our partnership with Ghana to promote economic growth and jobs.”
Lartey framed the fund’s further ambition plainly in remarks accompanying the launch: the organisation is targeting $1 billion in catalysed impact funds across Ghana and beyond. Ci-Gaba is described as the first vehicle in that programme, not the endpoint.
A comprehensive learning report with detailed case material and full stakeholder analysis is forthcoming. The summary report and framework are available at impactinvestinggh.org.