An independent perception-mapping evaluation by Populi LLP — drawing on 14 in-depth investor interviews and 16 survey responses across India and Kenya — offers the clearest picture yet of how investors actually engage waste and circular economy enterprises, and where that engagement stalls. Its central finding is not that investors grew more convinced of the sector; it is that they changed how they evaluate deals and that the barriers still holding capital back are structural, not informational.

The evaluation assessed the ANDE Access to Green Finance (A2GF) Initiative, backed by the IKEA Foundation. Over three years, A2GF tested a straightforward hypothesis: that with the right support, small and growing businesses tackling waste and circularity could become investable. The findings both validate that premise and sharpen it, showing where support moved investor behavior and where the ceiling on investment sits beyond anything programming can lift.

What actually shifted

The most consistent change across the cohort was how investors look at deals. Pipeline review — a structured reassessment of which waste and circular economy enterprises were worth considering — was present in 12 of 14 cases studied. Seven investors updated their internal diligence templates. Four made direct allocations or investments that can be plausibly linked to program participation.

Three knowledge gains recurred across almost every case: investors learned to differentiate between sub-sectors (plastics, organic waste, e-waste, textile, metal) rather than treating “waste” as a single category; they applied value-chain frameworks to understand collection, recovery, and recycling as distinct portfolio positions; and they developed more structured vocabulary for sector-specific risks including regulatory, execution, and exit risk. Survey data corroborates this: 75 percent of India respondents and 73 percent of Kenya respondents reported increased knowledge of investment models, with pre-to-post changes statistically significant in both countries.

The program’s most effective touchpoints were not classroom sessions. Investment guides and sector studies were the most-cited artefacts in both countries, still in use in external presentations and diligence conversations long after the cohort closed. Pitch events and demo days produced the clearest direct deal outcomes: two of the four plausibly attributable investments originated there. And peer learning among investors was the most consistently activated diffusion channel: investors sharing pipeline, running vendor checks, and referring opportunities to one another through groups that formed during the program.

What didn’t shift and why

Within the investor universe A2GF set out to reach, the response split cleanly: impact funds and debt funds moved; commercial venture capital did not. That distinction matters in context — ANDE’s target enterprises typically raise somewhere between a few hundred thousand and a few million dollars per round, which is early-stage territory at most, so growth-stage and mid-market commercial funds were never the natural audience for this pipeline. For the investors who were in scope, the evaluation is specific about what kept some on the sidelines, pointing to two structural constraints that sit above anything training or convening can address.

Government-payment risk — where municipal contracts underpin enterprise revenue and payment timelines are unpredictable — remains the single most-cited ceiling on investor appetite in both countries. Ticket-size mismatch is the second: the deals on offer, mostly a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars, fall below the ticket minimums development finance institutions will write (Norfund, for one, holds a floor around $5 million), while mid-market growth funds at roughly $8 million and above find the pipeline too thin. Neither is a problem better programming resolves.

What the capital gap demands next

The evaluation reframes the sector’s capital gap in a way that matters for what comes next. The shortfall is not a simple shortage of willing investors. It is the product of three things at once: a pipeline not yet sized for institutional capital, instruments that don’t match enterprise profiles, and structural risks with no national-level mitigation in place. Two priorities follow directly from what the evaluation found stalling investment.

First, the instruments have to catch up to the risk. Government-payment risk was the binding ceiling on appetite in both countries. Closing it calls for risk-sharing structures — guarantee facilities, first-loss or blended vehicles, and parametric mechanisms — that absorb payment-timing risk rather than asking individual investors to underwrite it deal by deal.

Second, the instruments have to catch up to the cheque size. The deals investors described, mostly a few hundred thousand to to a few million dollars, fall below DFI floors and below the threshold at which mid-market funds find enough pipeline to engage. Aggregation and pooled vehicles that bundle smaller deals into institutionally legible portfolios are a more promising route than waiting for enterprises to grow into existing fund mandates.

Neither of these is something ANDE, or any single actor, builds alone. But the evaluation is clear that the binding constraints are now coordination problems, not knowledge problems, and that is precisely where a convener earns its place: bringing capital providers, DFIs, philanthropic funders, and government counterparts to the same table to co-design instruments no one of them will build in isolation. The investor behavior change A2GF set out to catalyze has happened. The next phase is about building the financial architecture that lets that changed behavior translate into deployed capital.

The barriers that remain are not, at root, about technical complexity. They call for deliberate coordination across stakeholders that market forces are unlikely to produce on their own.