ThirdWay Africa

ThirdWay Africa

ThirdWay Africa was established in London in 2012 by Rebecca Marques and Gonçalo Neves Correia to channel institutional and impact-aligned capital into sub-Saharan African markets. The firm operates at the intersection of development finance and private equity, focusing on sectors where environmental rehabilitation and commercial viability overlap. Its founding thesis holds that degraded land in Mozambique, Zambia, and neighboring geographies can be restored into productive timber, agriculture, and conservation assets that generate risk-adjusted returns for limited partners. The firm is structured as an asset manager rather than a single-family office, raising third-party capital for dedicated vehicles. The firm's strategy spans regenerative agriculture, commercial forestry, renewable energy, and conservation real estate, with a geographic concentration in Mozambique and Southern Africa. Its flagship assets include large-scale macadamia and avocado operations developed on rehabilitated farmland, alongside solar mini-grid installations serving off-grid communities. ThirdWay also structures hospitality and eco-tourism investments on restored coastal and inland concessions, blending conservation covenants with commercial lodge operations. The approach is long-dated and illiquid, typically holding assets for a decade or more while land value and perennial crop yields mature. The firm co-invests alongside development finance institutions and impact-first family offices, though specific fund closes and LP identities remain private. ThirdWay Africa operates from its London headquarters, with an investment team that combines operators on the ground in Mozambique and financial professionals in the UK. The firm maintains several adjacent vehicles, including conservation trusts and community-development arms that manage the non-commercial aspects of its land concessions, separating fiduciary returns from philanthropic programming. In April 2024, the firm hosted institutional LP site visits to its Mozambique macadamia and solar assets, demonstrating operational maturity and pipeline depth to prospective allocators (per the firm, April 2024). The firm's structural differentiator is its strategy of layering commercial agriculture and energy infrastructure onto land that requires significant upfront rehabilitation — a model that creates a high barrier to entry through the multi-year restoration cycle before revenue materializes. Its returns are driven less by financial engineering and more by asset transformation, where land value appreciates because the underlying ecology has been restored. This operational intensity limits the addressable pool of co-investors to those comfortable with direct real-asset exposure in frontier markets.