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Advanced practices in local capital design: Trade Lenda
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Practitioners across Africa are already demonstrating what it means to build financial systems from the ground up. These begin with local market realities rather than models designed elsewhere. Yet this innovation is often invisible to the broader field, in part because it isn’t couched in conventional gender labels or formal frameworks. It works because it takes seriously what many financial actors do not: that the informal economy is not a problem to be solved before capital can move, but a system already organized around trust, accountability, and economic participation. The question is whether asset owners, asset managers, and financial intermediaries are willing to learn how to operate within it.
In West Africa, Trade Lenda’s approach confirms that there are financial actors willing to understand and work within informal systems. This case study explores Trade Lenda’s advanced practices in localization in more detail.
This case study is part of a series demonstrating how to see and shift power in investment processes, structures and analysis. Advancing gender equality and justice through finance takes more than increasing representation or moving more capital; it requires codifying the innovations already challenging how power and bias operate. Criterion Institute's Advanced Practice framework, built on the four principles of Will to Act, Integrity, Accountability, and Inclusion, identifies these innovations and shows how they can be adopted more widely by asset owners and managers. This series honors the financial actors already innovating in practice.
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