The West Africa Trade & Investment Hub (the Trade Hub) was a five-year project that promoted trade and investments in West Africa using private sector co-investments. Connexus led the Public Private Partnership (PPP) component of the Trade Hub, as part of Creative Associates’ consortium. As PPP lead, Connexus’s job was to identify and build a pipeline of more than 100 viable co-investments across 16 West African countries with firms, investors, and other financial partners and guide the partners through a co-creation process that led to disbursements of co-investment grants. The investments were targeted to create jobs in West Africa, particularly for women and youth, and increase export sales for African firms. Upon disbursement, co-investment managers accompanied the partners during the implementation of the activities, providing technical assistance and facilitating leveraging of additional monies from other private investors and, when necessary, helping to restructure the deals as unforeseen circumstances emerged. This approach led to more than 95% of the co-investments being delivered on time and successfully, a remarkable success rate for a Trade Hub activity.
Globally, the Trade Hub unlocked a total of $489M in private investments, generated $257M in exports, and created 86,482 jobs in 20 value chains including apparel, cashew, palm oil, soy, grains, fruits and vegetables, cacao, garment manufacturing, and agro-processing in Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Niger, Liberia, Cote D’Ivoire and Cabo Verde. By the end of the project, Connexus helped the Trade Hub implement 93 co-investment projects totaling more than $65M in co-investment with 93 private sector firms. Trade Hub grants enabled more than $683M in partner firm sales of agricultural produce, manufactured goods, energy, and services—including $123M in exports to the USA— and led to the creation of approximately 50,000 jobs for women and 45,000 jobs for youth.
Specific co-investments included:
- In Senegal, the Trade Hub worked with Laiterie du Berger on a $518,000 co-investment in a milk collection system that improved the collection of milk from small herders. Under this grant, more than 2,200 MT of fresh milk from 2,300 herders was pasteurized into fresh milk, cream, and yogurt products worth more than $1.1M in exports to national and regional markets.
- In Mali, the Trade Hub co-invested with Energy+ to import solar solutions for home lighting products in Mali. Together with other investors, this investment catalyzed sales of more than 30,000 off-grid solar products, saving an estimated 38 MT of CO2 emissions.
- In the health sector, the Trade Hub co-invested $3.3M in 8 West African private health care firms, including NEST4ALL, a Senegalese private health clinic operator, and GAINDE 2000, a telehealth services provider to integrate 12 new health care clinics on Gainde’s ORBUS Sante telehealth platform.
- In Cote D’Ivoire, the Trade Hub co-invested $540,000 with Coliba, a sanitation firm that collects plastic waste and recycles it into marketable plastic flakes. The Trade Hub co-investment helped to form and train members of a neighborhood plastic collection network that provided jobs to 2,500 women and 1,300 youth. In the initial year, the activity resulted in 1,300 MT of collected plastics cleaned up from Ivorian streets and processed into 900 MT of flaked plastic for export to Europe.
- In Ghana, the Trade Hub co-invested $1.3M with Ethical Apparel Africa (EAA) to expand its manufacturing facility. By leveraging a $6.9M in private sector investment, the company was able to expand production to increase apparel exports by $8.3M and add 826 in new jobs, 98% of which went to women.
Using a $700,000 co-investment grant from the Trade Hub, the ShEquity, a woman-owned African investment fund, leveraged $5M and launched the first fund for women-owned startups. In its initial cohort, ShEquity disbursed grants of $1,010,000 to seven women-led businesses creating 225 new jobs, most of which are for women.