Entrepreneurship Zone: 10 March 2025 : Opportunities in Côte d’Ivoire: Investor highlights potential in healthcare, education and agribusiness

Mon Mar 10 12:19:36 CAT 2025

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Entrepreneurship Zone: 10 March 2025 : Opportunities in Côte d’Ivoire:
Investor highlights potential in healthcare, education and agribusiness

 <https://www.firstcapitalbank.co.zw/> 

Nouss Bih

Investisseurs & Partenaires (I&P) is an impact investment firm with offices
in seven African countries. The firm invests across a wide range of
industries and deal sizes, both directly and through a series of
independently managed funds which it sponsors.

Nouss Bih is based in Abidjan and oversees I&P’s portfolio of investments
in Côte d’Ivoire. She spoke to How we made it in Africa to discuss the
firm’s investments into the healthcare, education and agriculture sectors.

I&P has made several healthcare investments in Côte d’Ivoire. How do you
approach investments in the healthcare sector?

As an impact investor, healthcare is a particularly interesting sector
because there is huge under-capacity. The vast majority of medical supplies
in the region are imported, so we see a lot of opportunities in import
substitution.

One example of this is our investment in Pharmivoire Nouvelle (PHN), which
manufactures soft-packaged intravenous (IV) solutions. Across the West
African region, 90% of IV fluids are imported, so there is a massive market
beyond just Côte d’Ivoire. Since our initial investment, PHN has started
selling products in both Burkina Faso and Niger.

Another area we like is medical clinics and diagnostic centres. As the
population expands and demand for healthcare increases, there is a crucial
role for the private sector to play in expanding healthcare capacity. Local
diagnostics centres and clinics are still scarce, with the most affluent
travelling abroad for treatment; there is a real need for quick, effective
diagnosis in the local market.

In this sector, we look for businesses with a clear differentiation angle
and the potential to become leaders in a particular niche. We recently
invested in Procréa, a reproductive health clinic in Abidjan that
specialises in techniques to help couples with infertility issues achieve
parenthood. As with many clinics in Abidjan, it started operations in a
residential building but the business has grown very quickly and no longer
has space to properly welcome the patients. We are currently investing in
the design and construction of a new purpose-built facility, which we hope
will consolidate its position as the leading fertility and mother-child
health centre in Côte d’Ivoire.

I&P is also active in Côte d’Ivoire’s education sector. Talk about some of
your investments and which areas of education offer opportunities for
entrepreneurs and businesspeople.

Education is another area with a shortfall in capacity and growing demand.
Though there is an increasing young population; many of them leave the
educational circuit early and with few qualifications. From an employer’s
view, there is still a huge gap between traditional theoretical training and
the needs of businesses.

Our investments in the education space are geared towards businesses that
focus their training on a clear market need. We have invested in
technology-enabled solutions that can address this need on a large scale
(for example, our investment in online professional training platform
Etudesk) but we are also conscious that for a lot of vocational training,
there is still a need for in-person learning. We have invested in a number
of businesses with a physical presence, such as Institut de Management, de
Gestion et d’Hôtellerie (IMGH) and the Centre des Métiers Michèle Yakice,
which specialise in hospitality and tailoring training respectively.

Tell us about the untapped opportunities in Côte d’Ivoire’s agribusiness
sector.

Like most sector-agnostic investors, we don’t invest in primary
agriculture, which requires specific capital and expertise that we cannot
provide.

However, we do see a lot of opportunities to invest along the value chain.
In Côte d’Ivoire, crops such as cacao have typically been exported as raw
materials and processed elsewhere, but there are opportunities for more
value to be captured domestically. An example is Rama Cereal, a business
that processes and packages grains and spices – such as millet, maize and
ginger – for sale to major supermarket chains like Citydia and Carrefour.

There are also a lot of opportunities for companies that can address
specific inefficiencies throughout the value chain, especially those that
contribute to achieve better agricultural yields or assess the quality of
products, either raw materials or processed food; businesses that provide
soil analysis, mechanisation, irrigation or sale of agricultural inputs like
seeds and fertilisers.

One area we are looking at is organic waste. There are growing
environmental concerns about the quantity of waste generated from
large-scale cocoa and cashew farming, and there are several uses of interest
from an investment angle: using cocoa by-products to produce fertiliser,
cosmetic products or combustible fuels.

While agribusiness is an important sector in the Ivorian economy, a large
proportion of the agro-processing businesses operate informally on a small
scale. Our strategy is to invest in businesses at an earlier stage (usually
through our smaller funds) and bring them to the point where they could be
eligible for funds with bigger deal sizes. Larger companies are still of
interest, although less common; we haven’t yet finalised any large
agribusiness investments in Côte d’Ivoire, as we have done in other
countries in the region.

What are some of the biggest difficulties you have when searching for
investment opportunities?

As an investor targeting deal sizes above €500,000, the biggest difficulty
we have is finding companies with reliable financials, that are sufficiently
formalised and with a proper/efficient organisation. There are companies
turning over millions of dollars but are not structured in a way that can
absorb that amount of capital. They may not have proper accounting
structures in place, or they may be keeping different books for the
management, the investors and the tax authorities.

Another thing we look at is the entrepreneur. It is important they are able
to articulate a clear vision, and build and lead a structured team. For us
to work with a business, we need to be sure the management team is open to
change. A lot of SMEs aren’t particularly good at recognising their
shortcomings, which is a huge hindrance to growth.

What do you see as some of the greatest risks for businesses in Côte
d’Ivoire’s economy today?

There has been a lot of progress in recent years but politics is still a
tangible risk. As we’ve recently seen, elections can cause lengthy slowdowns
in the economy. There are also a lot of businesses that are still exposed to
the state as a client. We avoid investing in companies reliant on public
tenders because fiscal instability at a government level can lead to
concerns over the recoverability of receivables.

Even for those not reliant on tenders, taxation can be an issue. Fiscal
policies change year on year and the fiscal charge is unevenly distributed
throughout the economy. Because there are relatively few of them, formal
companies can become targets and bear a particularly heavy fiscal load.

And as much as progress has been made, regional (ECOWAS) integration is
still not where we want it to be. We specifically look for businesses with
regional growth potential and there is still a lot of work to be done to
make cross-border trade more seamless.

—Howwemadeitinafrica

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