Very much committed to fairness and gender issues, she leveraged her decades-long experience to develop a network that would advance her goals.  

Tokunboh Ishmael (photo) is the co-founder and Managing Director of Alitheia Capital, an impact investment firm founded in 2007. In line with her ambition to invest “in equity, fairness, and inclusion to create wealth and transform lives,” Alitheia Capital’s support for African tech innovators has been growing over the years.  

In 2015, she created Alitheia IDF, a US$100 million investment fund that finances SMEs led by gender-diverse teams, furthering her commitment to fairness and gender issues. 

“Always drawn to uncharted waters, I was an early pioneer of impact investing, a visionary who saw the potential of Fintechs in Africa, and forged a path for injecting gender consciousness into the investment process,” her Linkedin about section reads.

Tokunboh Ishmael is an accomplished private equity manager. Her professional career started in 1988 when she joined Amerada Hess as a business analyst. She later assumed the same position at Citibank and BSG Consulting after that. From 1997 to 2000, she worked as an investment banker for Morgan Stanley before taking office as Sussex Place Ventures’ investment principal. In 2003, she left Sussex Place Ventures to join Aureos Capital, as a partner, in Nigeria. Two years later, the investment professional became the managing director of Avante Capital.

Upon leaving Avante Capital in 2007, she co-founded Alitheia Capital, which she now leads as the Managing director. Concurrently to her duties with her investment firm, from 2008 to 2011, she was the chairperson of the African Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (AVCA), a not-for-profit entity that “promotes, develops, and stimulates private equity and venture capital in Africa.”

Melchior Koba