Reframe Venture partners with fund managers and limited partners across emerging markets in Latin America, Africa, and South East Asia — on fit-for-purpose responsible investing (RI) and ESG practice.
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In parallel to our European and American community, we started slowly building out our emerging markets work over the last years. Throughout our long-term partnership with BII and FMO (since 2022) and GIZ (since 2023), we have repeatedly encountered two challenges inspiring our work:
Lack of specific tools and adequate alignment of stakeholders
Early-stage and tech-focused investors across emerging market contexts still lack adequate RI tools and frameworks. Relatedly, despite a large variety of guidance papers, including some specific work on VC from powerful LPs, alignment among them is missing. The result: competing priorities.
Non-specific tools for early-stage VC and emerging markets.
LP requirements for risk and impact management are typically unsuitable for tech and startups, as highlighted in our 2024 white paper.
A lack of alignment persists, causing confusion and hindering action across EM ecosystems.
Over-reliance on reporting continues to waste resources
Reporting, often based on non-specific frameworks, including the IFC performance standards, is often a major focus for emerging market investors. Reporting and compliance are what emerging market investors think ESG and RI are. A focus on material ESG issues is often missing, both in the reporting and even more dangerously in due diligence and portfolio work.
For startups and their new technologies to effectively and sustainably address the big emerging markets challenges, ecosystems must be guided by fit-for-purpose responsible investing (and impact) considerations. That is what we focus on with our emerging markets community.
We work on three core focus areas for Emerging Markets:
In collaboration with key Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) and leading emerging market VC funds, we developed the first emerging market VC-specific toolkit: our Emerging Markets ESG Universe of Issues Framework, launched in 2024 (and updated in 2025 with an online open source version).
Since then, we have developed more emerging markets-specific tools. Our tools are based on extensive research and interviews with VCs, LPs, and ecosystem players across emerging markets.
Available Tools:
Due Diligence Framework: Online tool for evaluating investment opportunities.
Legal Clauses Library: Contract templates for emerging market transactions.
Exclusion Lists: Risk identification and mitigation frameworks.
Upcoming Tools:
Sector-specific, emerging markets materiality napkins
Update of (existing) Due Diligence toolkit
Responsible AI and Data
We host monthly virtual community events to encourage peer-learning, community support, and best practice sharing. Everyone is welcome to join for free.
Quarterly regional community calls: With three quarterly calls - one for LatAm, Africa and APAC respectively - we are creating more solid connections and peer learning opportunities.
Monthly Deep Dive Calls: once a month, we dive into one topic affecting emerging markets. Bringing together a knowledgeable panel each time - with VCs, LPs and experts - we will touch on the issues that drive our communities, such as how to raise DFI money and what is the best practice of gender lens investing in emerging markets.
3 - Capacity building:
Tailored training programs aimed at enhancing the skills and knowledge of fund managers and other stakeholders. We have trained over 50 VCs and early-stage investors in diverse locations, including Senegal, Mexico (conducted twice), Egypt, Côte d'Ivoire, and Brazil.
Our training program is adjusted to the context of early-stage emerging market realities, with specific examples, VC and LP speakers, and case studies.
