Our Approach
Rooted in diverse backgrounds and lived experiences, our team shares a deep, personal commitment to advancing sustainable development in emerging and frontier markets.
Together, we work to unlock systemic levers that close persistent development gaps and help bridge the USD 4 trillion SDG investment gap in developing countries.
How we collaborate
Sustainability
We support businesses in embedding sustainability across their operations, ensuring they can safeguard and enhance value while driving positive environmental and social impact.
Innovation
We partner with innovative solution providers to unlock pathways for scaling their impact, including matching them with the right actors for effective integration.
Knowledge
We believe in empowering stakeholders with knowledge and tools to drive sustainable finance adoption. Our initiatives include boot camps and workshops; sector-specific training; as well as insights and research dissemination.
Our Team
Our handpicked specialists in finance and sustainability are assembled on an as-needed basis,
to align with individual project requirements and to maintain flexibility.
Our Team
Our Team
Our handpicked specialists in finance and sustainability are assembled on an as-needed basis, to align with individual project requirements and to maintain flexibility.
Why Nsiona?
A few words from our founder.
Institutional investors want access to sustainability-enhancing opportunities in frontier and emerging markets at compelling risk-adjusted returns.
For most of them, that access is fragmented, arriving late, or in a form their investment committees cannot assess.
I know, because for eighteen years I was one of those investors: first at JPMorgan Asset Management, later at Pictet – with clients that included some of Western Europe’s largest pension funds.
The opportunities were real. The route to them, in a form a committee could approve, rarely was.
I also understand personally what unfamiliarity can cost.
I was born in Kinshasa, but raised by a Belgian family.
My adoptive father was a close friend of my biological father, Ignace Nsiona Kuzubula, who overcame great adversity to pursue education and leadership in what was then Zaire.
Growing up in Belgium and starting my career at the bottom of the ladder, I was made to understand, more than once, that I did not belong.
I would have to prove more and accept less to earn the same place. In a sense, I paid a premium for being unfamiliar.
Markets do the same to what they do not know, and issuers and businesses across frontier markets pay it every day, in basis points, on opportunities whose fundamentals merit better terms.
Nowhere is that premium wider, or less deserved, than in Africa.
Nsiona Impact exists to reduce that gap.
I was born in Kinshasa, but raised by a Belgian family.
My adoptive father was a close friend of my biological father, Ignace Nsiona Kuzubula, who overcame great adversity to pursue education and leadership in what was then Zaire.
Growing up in Belgium and starting my career at the bottom of the ladder, I was made to understand, more than once, that I did not belong. I would have to prove more and accept less to earn the same place. In a sense, I paid a premium for being unfamiliar.
Markets do the same to what they do not know, and issuers and businesses across frontier markets pay it every day, in basis points, on opportunities whose fundamentals merit better terms.
Nowhere is that premium wider, or less deserved, than in Africa.
Nsiona Impact exists to reduce that gap.
We source, prepare and structure sustainability-enhancing transactions from frontier and emerging markets, with Africa at the centre of our work, so that institutional capital can assess them with confidence and act on them with speed. We do it from the inside, with the presence, relationships and discipline that narrow the premium to what the risk actually warrants.
The firm carries my father’s name because that is where the conviction comes from.
If you are an investor, a development finance institution or a fund with a mandate for frontier and emerging markets, we would like to show you what that access looks like in practice.
Alain Nsiona Defise
Founder and CEO