HEVA Fund LLP has spent twelve years demonstrating what the broader market has not: that creative-economy enterprises in emerging markets can be originated, underwritten, and recovered at institutional quality. This is the evidentiary base for HPCIF.
In 2013, George Gachara and a group of multidisciplinary artists founded the Nest Collective in Nairobi — a creative studio and production house that became one of East Africa's most internationally recognised artistic voices. Stories of Our Lives, the Nest Collective's landmark anthology film documenting LGBTQ+ lives in Kenya, screened at the Berlinale, TIFF, and was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The collective's work demonstrated, irrefutably, that African creative production could reach the world's most demanding institutional stages.
But the Nest Collective could not get the working capital it needed to scale. The gap was structural, not about quality or ambition. That experience became the founding thesis of HEVA Fund LLP in 2015: creative enterprises in Africa are fundable — the financial infrastructure to serve them simply does not exist yet. HEVA was built to be that infrastructure. This is not mission language. It is the unfair advantage that no new entrant can replicate — twelve years of origination, underwriting, and recovery data built from the inside.
HEVA's sector taxonomy is not a grant-making eligibility list. It is a proprietary underwriting classification — each sector has a distinct cash-flow model, collateral profile, and risk underwriting approach. 12 years of portfolio data across all eight sectors. See Vision →
HEVA was designed from inception as a financial intermediary. Its model combines proprietary risk underwriting with a suite of eight financial products tailored to creative-enterprise cash flows: irregular revenue, intangible assets, project-based income cycles, and rights-based collateral. No comparable intermediary in the HPCIF target markets has published underwriting data of this vintage or depth for the creative economy.
In March 2025, HEVA launched a $5 million (KES 644 million) scale-up of the Ota Kopa facility through four financial service providers and two aggregators — establishing the on-lending infrastructure that the HPCIF Creative Liquidity Facility (CLF, $40M revolving: $30M senior + $10M first-loss) will scale across five Pan-African markets. The CLF targets approximately 1,260 loans at an average $150,000 ticket with an average 120-day tenor.
Projected · HPCIF Financial Model v12.0 (Feb 2026) · not a guarantee; actual returns may be materially lower or negative. See PPM Part C.
HEVA restructured Story Zetu's debt during COVID-19 and spent months building a five-year financial strategy. By 2024, the company had set new standards for fair wages across Kenya's theatre sector and become a model for how theatre can be financially sustainable.
"It was the first time we felt truly seen. Thrive aligned with our values. It wasn't just money, it was partnership."
Every named creative-economy vehicle in the current African landscape is either new (Next Narrative Africa Fund, $40M, 2024; Afreximbank Africa Film Fund, $1B PE, launched May 2025; Sony Innovation Fund Africa, $10M, 2023) or a bank facility without a fund-level operating history (Afreximbank CANEX, $2B facility). None publishes credit quality data. None has a 12-year portfolio.
The standard DFI objection to creative-economy investment is: "creative industries are unbankable." HEVA's portfolio is the empirical refutation of that claim. The HPCIF three-tranche architecture (CCF grant / CLF senior debt / CIF equity) is designed so each class of DFI investor enters through the tranche matching their mandate — a structure that Mirova and AfricaGrow have used in clean energy and pan-African SME finance, applied to creative industries for the first time at this scale.
HEVA's proven track record is East African — 14 countries across East Africa and the Indian Ocean rim. HPCIF's target deployment markets extend that footprint into West and Francophone Africa: ECOWAS (Nigeria · Ghana) and UEMOA/XOF zone (Senegal · Côte d'Ivoire). What transfers to these new geographies is not country relationships — those will be built with local partners and regulated financial intermediaries on the ground. What transfers is the instrument design and the on-lending-through-regulated-local-intermediaries method: the same working-capital structuring logic, the same underwriting models calibrated to creative-enterprise cash flows, the same first-loss architecture that makes the credit investable. HEVA's 12 years in East Africa produced the playbook; HPCIF is its Pan-African deployment. For the full geography rationale, see the Geography page.
HPCIF is the first fully blended, multi-sector, Pan-African creative-economy fund at scale — sponsored by HEVA Fund LLP, Africa's only seasoned creative-finance intermediary, with 12+ years of operations, 100+ creative businesses financed, $40M+ in direct investments and $100M+ in cumulative program disbursements across 14 East African countries, backing a portfolio that is 72% youth-led and 58% women-led. No comparable creative-economy vehicle publishes a credit track record.