This month has been a reflective one for the Goodwell team. We’ve been wrapping up our 2025 impact reporting process, celebrating new investments through IYBA WE4A – including our first ever investment in Malawi – and having contemplative conversations about AI. We’ve also been thinking about networks, and even maps: specifically, what it means when the world agrees to think differently about itself. Here’s what has been on our radar this month.
New connections for Malawi
September brought an exciting milestone for us: our first investment in Malawi, through our partnership with IYBA WE4A. We’re currently digging much deeper into the investment landscape and ecosystem of Malawi, connecting with local entrepreneurs and learning as we go.
The recent Tanzania–Malawi Business and Investment Forum in Dar es Salaam caught our attention. Goodwell already has an uMunthu portfolio company within Tanzania (EA Foods),as well as a couple of IYBA WE4A loan recipients, and we’re encouraged by the possibility of the two countries moving towards deeper investment, manufacturing and cross-border value chains. Tanzanian exports to Malawi increased from around USD 64 million in 2021 to almost USD 89.5 million in 2025, creating a foundation for more ambitious economic cooperation.
For us, the interesting question is what impact an eventual shift from trade to investment will have. What opportunities might arise when raw materials, entrepreneurs, infrastructure, finance, and markets start connecting across borders? When individual transactions grow into an integrated ecosystem? It’s the kind of regional development that we’re interested to see, and eager to foster.
AI: useful tool or expensive distraction?
AI continues to be a regular topic of conversation in our office. Some of our portfolio companies are already using AI in practical ways (helping to pre-screen insurance claims, for example) with the potential to make services faster and more scalable. But we’re also conscious that AI is not automatically synonymous with progress.
An article that caught our attention this month was Charles Hugh Smith’s reflection on the emerging divide between those who can use AI critically and those who may become overly dependent on it. Smith argues that while AI can mimic cognition, it cannot replace the tacit knowledge and hard-won skills that allow people to judge whether an answer is actually useful.
That feels particularly relevant to impact investing. Technology can amplify good decisions, but it can amplify bad ones too. The question we must ask is not “can AI do that?”, but “can AI help people do that better?”.
And, of course, there is the small matter of whether all this AI spending actually makes money. Is AI Profitable Yet? is a funny – but revealing – way of looking at the economics of the situation humanity is in. It highlights the huge gap between AI spending and revenue, reminding us that hype, adoption, and profitability are three different things.
Where has all the early money gone?
Speaking of AI – there is a lot of general chat in impact investing about AI potentially taking up an oversized amount of early-stage funding capital. While it is becoming cheaper to build a company (thanks in part to AI, it must be admitted) the initial funding needed to get promising businesses off the ground is harder and harder to come by. A recent guest blog by Gregoire de Padirac in The Big Deal highlights why this matters: without early capital, fewer businesses make it to the stage where larger investors can step in.
This resonates strongly with our own work. Through our partnership with IYBA WE4A, we’re investing in entrepreneurs who are often still building their businesses and need the right kind of capital to grow. After all, impact investing is not only about backing individual companies, but also about building the kind of finance systems that enable entrepreneurs to succeed.
The power of human networks
Another article we enjoyed this month explored something inherently more complex than AI: human networks.
Gerald Ashley’s musings on clusters, hubs, and distant ties considers how information and opportunity flow via relationships. Strong ties give us trust and shared knowledge, while weaker ties often connect us to entirely different circles, with new information, perspectives, and opportunities.
It’s a useful lens for impact investing, where relationships often matter as much as capital. We know from lived experience that the right connection can open a market, surface an entrepreneur, share lessons across companies and sectors, or build investor support around a common goal. Our aim as impact investors shouldn’t be to build bigger networks, but to build the right networks, which best facilitate the sharing of ideas and influence.
Seeing Africa as it really is
Finally, we were moved by the symbolic development at the United Nations: the General Assembly endorsed a resolution supporting the Equal Earth map projection, which representscontinents in much closer proportion to their actual size.
Impact investors know that representation matters. Entire generations have been trained to diminish Africa – socially, economically, even visually. The Equal Earth projection offers a – literally – different perspective. As the continent’s economies, entrepreneurs, and markets increasingly move towards centre stage, it is fitting that the world finally becomes more conscious of how we view Africa.
