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Africa GreenCo Group Limited has secured a $10 million equity investment from Sanlam Alternative Investments, the private markets arm of Sanlam Investments. With the investment, the South African asset manager becomes Africa GreenCo’s first commercial private institutional shareholder.
The transaction gives Sanlam Alternative Investments a 10% stake in GreenCo and is intended to further expand the company’s electricity trading operations across the Southern African Power Pool (SAPP). The deal is a further sign of growing institutional confidence in Africa-built energy infrastructure.
“We built GreenCo on the belief that Africa should not wait for someone else to finance its energy transition; if the continent can provide its own creditworthy, commercially bankable market infrastructure then institutional capital will follow,” said Pug Bennet, co-founder and Group CFO of Africa GreenCo.
GreenCo’s strength is its ability to integrate four capabilities: long-term offtake agreements with renewable independent power producers; power sale agreements with mines, commercial and industrial customers, and utilities; continuous regional electricity trading across SAPP and the emerging SAWEM market; and active portfolio optimisation.
This combined model gives IPP lenders a creditworthy counterparty, offers commercial consumers reliable low-carbon power, and supports utilities through wheeling and settlement services.
Founded in 2015, the company employs more than 80 professionals across Zambia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia, with licensing underway in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It has traded more than 2TWh of electricity to date and currently holds the highest purchase-side market share in SAPP’s competitive markets.
The company is backed by development finance institutions, including InfraCo Africa and Danish lender IFDK, and its credit capacity is reinforced by GuarantCo, part of the Private Infrastructure Development Group, rated AA- by Fitch and A1 by Moody’s.
Bennet added, “Sanlam Alternative Investments has been one of the most consistent allocators of capital into African sustainable infrastructure for more than a decade, and their aim to be Africa’s premier sustainable and impact investor maps directly onto the role GreenCo plays in Southern Africa’s power markets. This round positions GreenCo to further scale and to keep delivering the bankable offtake that finances new generation and the reliable, increasingly low carbon power that commercial and large industrial users across the region depend on.”
For Sanlam Alternative Investments, the investment is a natural extension of more than a decade of infrastructure commitments on the continent. The firm has deployed over $1.04 billion (ZAR 17 billion) into 40 sustainable infrastructure projects through managed funds, including its Sustainable Infrastructure Fund.
“GreenCo occupies the part of the energy value chain that determines whether new power generation is actually delivered. For Sanlam Alternative Investments, this investment is a natural extension of more than a decade of infrastructure investment across the continent: backing the market architecture that allows Africa to finance its own energy transition on commercial terms, while supporting the reliable, increasingly low-carbon power that economic growth depends on,” said Mark Moorhouse, Executive Head of Infrastructure Finance, Sanlam Alternative Investments.
In December 2025, Impact Fund Denmark made an additional investment in the company in the form of a $6 million (approximately DKK 39 million) loan. Furthermore, the European Commission provided a €50 million (DKK 373 million) guarantee through Impact Fund Denmark. This capital was intended to provide GreenCo with greater financial security so that it can facilitate the massive expansion of renewable energy in southern Africa.
