Goodwell Investments, a firm with offices in the Netherlands and South Africa that invests in companies serving people with low incomes, recently placed its second equity investment in Musoni Services, a holding of Musoni Investments that offers software for managing microfinance institutions. The sizes of the investment and the stake being taken by Goodwell remain confidential. Musoni Services plans to use the liquidity to boost its development team as well as its sales team to enable growth in new markets.
Musoni Services’ software package, which is called the Musoni System, offers features to manage services such as lending, deposits, SMS (text messaging) notifications and tablets with off-line functionality. Users of the software-as-a-service pay an annual fee based on the size of the institution. The Musoni System is licensed to 93 microfinance institutions in Africa and Asia as of December 2017.
Musoni Investments, which is based in the Netherlands, also holds a stake in Musoni Kenya, which was founded in 2010 and provides digital loans to smallholder farmers and informal enterprises in Kenya. Its loan sizes range from KES 500 (USD 5) to KES 3 million (USD 30,000) at monthly interest rates of 1.67 percent for individual loans and 1.83 percent for group loans. As of 2018, the institution has 23 branches and KES 1.2 billion (USD 12 million) in loans outstanding to 25,000 individuals and groups.
Goodwell, which originally invested in Musoni Services in 2015, has a total of 25 investees with 30,000 employees serving 12 million households in Africa and India. It recently launched a fund called uMunthu through which it seeks to raise EUR 100 million (USD 123 million) to invest in “inclusive growth sectors” in sub-Saharan Africa such as financial inclusion and agribusiness.
Sources and Additional Resources:
Goodwell press release
http://goodwell.nl/news/862/
Musoni Investments
http://musoni.eu/musoni-invesments/
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