Ghana Gets It
How one woman moved a pension system from 0.58% to a 5% mandate — and became an investor in our fund
Here’s a trade almost nobody was watching, and it’s the best one I’ve seen on the continent all year. Ghana just told its pension and insurance funds that they must put at least 5% of assets under management into venture capital and private equity by 2026. Not “may.” Must. And here’s the kicker that tells you how big the gap was: right now those funds have all of 0.58% in alternatives — even though the rules have let them go as high as 25% for years.* Read that again. The door was unlocked the whole time. Nobody would walk through it.
So what changed? Somebody sat in the room until they did.
I met Hamdiya Ismaila at SOCAP 2025 and — I’ll be honest — I didn’t realize who she was. Months earlier I’d met one of her team members in Lagos at AVCA, the brilliant Dinah Hammond, so the name wasn’t cold, but I didn’t connect the dots. It wasn’t until the paperwork started coming across my desk for our new fund a week later, and I kept seeing the same signature: hers, CEO of Savannah Impact Advisory, one of our investors. That’s the moment it landed. This is the woman who opened the doors of Ghana’s pension funds. Who, patiently and unglamorously, sat down at the table with the people guarding the country’s long-term savings and figured out how to get them comfortable backing VC funds like ours.
You want to know why that’s hard? Pension money is the most risk-averse capital on earth, and it should be. It’s not play money. It’s the retirement of teachers, nurses, drivers, market traders. Every instinct in that system says no. But here’s the thing: pension funds are long money and patient capital. They’re built for horizons measured in decades, not quarters. African pension funds are the most perfectly suited pool of capital for the realities of African private markets — the long gestation, the illiquidity, the patient compounding. The match was always there. Hamdiya’s approach refused to accept “no” as the permanent answer.
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So I was super excited to have the opportunity to hear her story this year in Accra, where we hosted a fireside chat with her. This was a LoftyInc exclusive where the team learned firsthand lessons of pioneering capital, leadership, and ingenuity. The success that resulted in Ghana’s pension fund legislation seemingly overnight took time. There were iterations. Meeting after meeting. Building trust one skeptical trustee at a time. Chasing real feedback, not the niceties, and then, the part most people skip, actually operationalizing a solution. A funding vehicle that works for the pension funds and the fund managers and the entrepreneurs at the end of the line. That’s significant. That’s plumbing. And plumbing is what moves capital.
But here’s what I keep coming back to, the part that makes this more than a headline: who actually owns this money? The pensioners do. They are the ultimate shareholders. So when capital can finally flow from a retiree’s savings in Kumasi into a founder building something real in Accra or Lagos, and that company grows, and the returns flow back. That’s not charity and it’s not a slogan. That’s wealth staying local and compounding for the people who created it.
This is the start of something very exciting for Ghana. The prosperity paradox is unlocked now in a very real way. When the risk-averse money finally moves, it doesn’t tiptoe. It sets the floor for everyone. I believe we are witnessing a structural bid under African venture capital — and it has women at its fore.
I’m proud to know Hamdiya. I am inspired by her story. I am honored to be a part of her work and her impact. Trailblazer is an overused word. She’s the rare case where it undersells the work.
