Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes has built a career around capital, enterprise and, increasingly, the question of who gets access to both. A prominent Nigerian venture capitalist, private equity investor and entrepreneur, she is the Founder and Managing Partner of Aruwa Capital Management and one of Africa’s youngest female private equity fund managers. She has also become a leading voice for gender-lens investing, dynamic capital allocation and SME growth across West Africa.
An Economics graduate from the University of Bristol, Rhodes began her career in investment banking in London at Lehman Brothers before moving to J.P. Morgan, where she worked across Leveraged Finance and Mergers & Acquisitions, executing more than $5 billion in cross-border transactions across emerging markets. She later moved into Africa-focused private equity at TLG Capital before co-founding Syntaxis Capital Africa, where, as Managing Partner, she focused on deploying growth capital to SMEs across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Today, through Aruwa Capital, she helps direct investment toward businesses founded or led by women, that employ gender-diverse workforces, or that provide goods and services for the female economy. The firm is one of the few women-owned and women-led private equity firms operating on the continent.
Rhodes became the first solo female General Partner in Nigeria to raise more than $10 million for a debut institutional fund and, subsequently, the first female solo GP in Africa to raise over $50 million in a fund. Alongside managing Aruwa Capital’s portfolio investments across Nigeria and Ghana, she serves on corporate boards spanning healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing and hospitality.
Her work has earned global industry recognition, including the 2X Global Woman Fund Manager of the Year award and a place among Institut Choiseul’s 100 Laureates under 40 shaping Africa’s economic future.
In this conversation with Yinka Olatunbosun, she discusses her work towards sustainable wealth creation and building structural support for women across Africa’s business ecosystem.
You launched Aruwa Capital Management at just 29, after an already successful career in investment banking and private equity. What made you decide that it was time to build something of your own?
The decision was less about reaching a particular age and more about the fact that I had spent my entire career seeing the underrepresentation of women in finance and in capital allocation. J.P. Morgan, and later TLG Capital and Syntaxis Africa, gave me a strong foundation. I learned how capital moves, how investment decisions get made and what makes a business worth backing. I also saw clearly who was consistently left out. The companies I found most compelling were rarely the ones getting funded: SMEs in the “missing middle”, too large for microfinance and too small for the large private equity funds, needing cheques of $1 million to $3 million that almost nobody in our market was writing. In addition, less than 2% of capital was going to women.
At 29, I had enough experience to understand the industry and not quite enough to be intimidated by it, and I had the faith to believe things could be done differently. I wanted to build a firm that delivered strong commercial returns, while being deliberate about where that capital goes and what it builds. Seven years on, with about $80 million under management across two funds and 17 portfolio companies, the thesis has held. A gender lens has never been a concession on returns. It is how we find businesses the rest of the market has mispriced.
Looking back, starting at 29 was both daunting and liberating. I didn’t have all the answers, but I had strong conviction.
Before Aruwa, you had already built an impressive career across J.P. Morgan, TLG Capital and Syntaxis Capital Africa. What did those years teach you about money, power and who gets access to capital?
Those years taught me that capital follows trust. It follows networks, familiarity and proximity just as much as it follows fundamentals. The businesses that get funded are not always the best businesses; they are often simply the ones closest to the people writing the cheques.
Across J.P. Morgan, TLG Capital and Syntaxis, I sat in the rooms where those decisions were made, and I could see who was being overlooked. Women entrepreneurs. SMEs in sectors considered unglamorous. Markets that were underestimated because nobody in the room had ever lived in them or been on the ground.
That is what shaped our thesis at Aruwa Capital. We invest in female-led and female-focused companies in non-cyclical sectors with robust gross margins, essential goods and services people buy whether or not the economy is up or down. That is a discipline, not a compromise, and it is my answer to anyone who assumes a gender lens means a softer investment case.
There is often a glamorous narrative around leaving a successful career to build your own company. What did the early days of Aruwa actually look like when there was no guarantee it would work?
The early days were far from glamorous. For a long stretch, it was me, a laptop and a pitch deck, doing the work nobody sees: building a pipeline, meeting entrepreneurs, putting in place the governance and processes an institutional investor would eventually want to see, all without knowing when, or whether, we would raise our fund.
First-time fund managers face a circular problem, you cannot raise capital without a track record and a team, and you cannot build a track record or team without capital. What kept me going was the conviction that the gap was real, and a fair amount of stubbornness. I also learned very quickly that you have to become comfortable with uncertainty, because the alternative is standing still.
Those early years taught me that building something meaningful is mostly consistency, resilience, persistence and being willing to do the work long before anyone is paying attention. The recognition came much later, and it came because of the hardwork and persistence, not instead of it. It took me eight years to raise my first fund in Africa and that journey has made me a better investor and leader today.
Today, Aruwa manages about $80 million across two funds. At what point did you realise that what you had started was becoming much bigger than the original idea?
I don’t think there was one single moment. It happened gradually, as the businesses we backed grew into companies several times the size we first met, as our companies raised external capital at valuations much higher than ours, as entrepreneurs began coming to us before they went anywhere else, and as institutions like British International Investment, Bank of Industry, TotalEnergies Closed Pension Fund and Ford Foundation put their capital behind us. That was when I realised we were building something with a life beyond the original idea I had at 29.
Reaching our first close of Aruwa Fund II was significant and our second fund close was another milestone. But the measure I care about is not the size of the funds. It is that 17 companies now sit in the portfolio, six of them manufacturers making locally what Nigeria would otherwise import, and that 70% of the direct jobs across those businesses are held by people under 35.
At some point Aruwa became an institution with 19 people in it making lasting impact in Nigeria by investing in companies solving meaningful problems and contributing to long term economic growth in our markets.
Aruwa deliberately invests in businesses that serve women, are led by women or have significant female participation in their workforce and value chain. Beyond the social argument, what have the numbers taught you about the business case for investing in women?
The numbers have reinforced what we believed from the beginning: investing in women is not just the right thing to do, it is smart business. Women drive household purchasing decisions and they dominate the informal trade that moves goods across our markets. Yet, that economic contribution remains significantly undercapitalised.
In our portfolio, 70% of companies are female-led or female-founded and 60% are female-founded or co-founded. Every one of them operates under an Operational and Financial Action Plan that includes a Gender Action Plan, so this is measured rather than asserted. With that backdrop, we have seen in Fund I, 29x in revenue growth on average since our investment, 7x valuation uplifts when these companies raise subsequent funding rounds and financial returns above global benchmarks. Our performance is showcasing that investing with a gender lens is a competitive advantage for superior financial returns. But in addition, the same portfolio is also creating meaningful social impact, supporting over 200,000 jobs in Nigeria and Ghana.
Ultimately, a gender lens is a sourcing advantage. It puts us in front of businesses other funds never see and it is not about investing in women at the expense of returns, it is about recognising that women represent one of the largest and most underserved economic opportunities in Africa.
You have described women as an overlooked economic opportunity. Why do you think investors have been so slow to recognise the scale and spending power of the female economy in Africa?
Part of it is that the frameworks were built elsewhere. If your model of a market is drawn from formal, salaried, urban consumption, you will miss the woman who buys for a household of eight, sells in an open market and never appears in the data set investors use to size an opportunity.
The bigger issue is also categorisation. Gender gets filed under impact, impact gets filed under concessionary, and the whole opportunity is then assessed against the wrong benchmark. Nobody has ever described a fund that only backs men as a thematic strategy.
That is changing, and quickly. As more data becomes available and investors look past inherited assumptions, the $15 trillion female economy becomes harder to ignore. For me, the opportunity was never to invest in women as a category; it was to understand women as a powerful economic force and build an investment strategy around that reality.
Private equity remains a space with relatively few women at the top.
Your investments cut across healthcare, financial services, renewable energy, consumer goods, agriculture and technology. When an entrepreneur walks into the room looking for investment, what makes you sit up and pay attention?
The founder, first. I want someone who understands their customer better than I ever will and who can tell me precisely why the problem exists, not simply that it does. I am looking for clarity of thought, resilience, and a willingness to change course and adapt when the numbers and market say so.
Then the model. We invest in non-cyclical sectors with robust gross margins, so I want pricing power and a product people buy in a bad month as well as a good one. Evidence of traction, strong repeat purchases, a customer who would be genuinely inconvenienced if the company disappeared. We are backing the business and the person leading it, and we are taking an equity stake and staying for years, so both have to hold up.
And I pay attention to ambition and vision. Six of our 17 companies are manufacturers, and we backed them because their founders weren’t trying to import a little more efficiently; they were building to make things locally despite all the challenges. That kind of ambition is rare, and it is worth supporting.
You have gone from analysing and executing deals for other institutions to being responsible for your own investors, team and portfolio companies. How has becoming a founder changed the kind of leader you are?
Becoming a founder has made me far more comfortable with imperfect information. Earlier in my career, I was executing inside institutions with established structures and resources. As a founder, there is no playbook; you decide, often before you have everything you would like to have, and you own the outcome.
It has also made me a more empathetic leader. I have 18 people whose careers I am responsible for, LPs whose capital I am accountable for and founders who need me to be useful and impactful rather than merely present. Leadership isn’t about having all the answers. It is about creating clarity, making the difficult call when it is required, and giving people enough room to do their best work.
Most importantly, I’ve learned that building an institution is very different from building a career. I sit on and chair boards now, and much of what I do is make decisions that will still matter long after I am the person making them.
You are an investor, entrepreneur, CEO, wife and mother. Has your definition of success changed as your career and your life have become fuller?
Definitely. Earlier in my career, success was tied to achievement: the next role, the next deal, the next milestone, and I measured myself against a list. I have two young children now and a firm with employees who rely on me to bring my best.
Today I think about success more holistically: building Aruwa into an institution that endures and can run without me, having real impact through the businesses we back, being present for the people I love, and continuing to grow as a person. People ask how I balance it; I don’t, and I don’t even try. Some weeks the firm gets more of me and some weeks my family does. The ambition is still very much there; I have just stopped confusing a career that looks impressive with a life that feels like mine.
For someone whose professional life revolves around assessing risk, are you equally calculated in your personal life, or is there a completely different Adesuwa away from the spreadsheets and investment committees?
I’m definitely far more calculated professionally than I am personally! Investing trains you to model the downside, run the scenarios and ask what breaks. Life doesn’t hand you a five-year model.
Away from work, I’m much more instinctive; I trust my gut, I say yes to things quickly, I try not to overanalyse. I think you need both; if you ran your personal life like an investment committee, you would never do anything spontaneous, and you would miss most of what makes life worth living.
You have achieved quite a lot at a relatively young age, including being named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and 2X Global Woman Fund Manager of the Year. What still feels unfinished to you?
We are just getting started at Aruwa; being only seven years old, we haven’t even scratched the surface yet of what is possible. Recognition is meaningful, but it is never the destination, and it tends to arrive for work you finished years earlier. There is still so much I want to build with Aruwa Capital.
I want Aruwa to become an enduring African investment institution, one that outlives me and keeps creating value for investors, entrepreneurs and the communities our companies employ. I also want us to have proved, with realised returns rather that the markets and founders this industry has historically overlooked can deliver exceptional performance. We are 17 companies in, and returns get judged at exit, so that case is still being made.
I don’t spend much time thinking about what I’ve already achieved. I’m far more interested in what we build next.
When you think about Aruwa ten years from now, what does growth look like? Is the ambition a much larger fund, expansion across Africa, a broader investment mandate—or something else entirely?
Growth is about much more than a larger fund. Of course we want to grow the capital base, but the ambition is a lasting institution, not an AUM number.
I have a vision of Aruwa Capital being a multi-asset class and multi-country platform. We plan to extend beyond Nigeria and Ghana and keep identifying market gaps that present mispriced opportunities. Getting bigger for the sake of being bigger is how funds lose their discipline and style drift; we won’t do that.
Ten years from now, I would like Aruwa to be recognised as one of Africa’s leading investment platforms, one that delivered strong returns across multiple funds and, in doing so, changed how investors think about female fund managers and female entrepreneurs, recognising that we are also capable of driving Africa’s growth.
Away from capital, deals and boardrooms, who is Adesuwa? What do travel, tennis, cooking and time with your family give you that work cannot?
Away from work, I enjoy good food, travel, and quality time with my family. Tennis gives me a completely different kind of energy; it is competitive enough to satisfy that part of me, and it forces me to be fully present: you cannot use your phone and return serve at the same time.
Time with my family reminds me there is a whole world outside this one and that the most meaningful moments rarely have a milestone attached to them.
My children also make me better at what I do. They give me perspective, they help me recharge, and provide a greater sense of purpose and responsibility to leave Nigeria in a better state than I met it for them and their generation.
