ADMINEXISTS
The Anatomy of a Deal: Be Girl & GCC | Investing in Menstrual Health for Girls
The Health Finance Coalition (HFC) recently worked with Be Girl, an innovative social enterprise changing the way menstrual health is addressed in Africa, to secure a new $500,000 investment from Grand Challenges Canada (“GCC”). Together, Be Girl’s CEO & Founder, Diana Sierra, GCC’s Equity Investments Lead, Brishan Rowjee, and HFC’s Swathi Rao discuss the step-by-step process of the deal’s transaction construction to expand access to Be Girl’s innovative products across Africa.
What health challenge do you aim to solve and how does Be Girl address it?
SIERRA: The health challenge Be Girl aims to address is menstrual health inequality, which encompasses both a lack of access to affordable, high-quality menstrual products and inadequate menstrual health education. These barriers often lead to girls missing school, feeling ashamed of their bodies, or facing long-term health risks. Be Girl addresses this by designing and distributing reusable, dignified menstrual products and by developing educational tools that help girls understand their bodies and make informed choices about their health. We believe that when girls have both the tools and the knowledge, they gain the confidence and opportunity to thrive.
Why was Be Girl interested in seeking more capital?
SIERRA: Be Girl is seeking more capital to scale what we already know works: high-quality menstrual products paired with impactful education. As a social enterprise, we maintain low margins to ensure affordability, but this limits our ability to invest heavily in growth. After testing and learning from a direct-to-consumer model in Mozambique, we pivoted to a business-to-business approach (partnering with governments, UN agencies, and NGOs), which has proven far more sustainable and impactful. To date, we’ve distributed over a million products and reached over 530,000 youth with menstrual health education. But we know that’s not enough. Our goal is to reach 1.2 million youth by 2030, and to do that, we need to scale faster and more efficiently. With additional capital, we can make that leap, transforming education delivery and reaching the next generation with tools that promote dignity, equity, and menstrual health literacy worldwide.
Could you walk us through the transaction construction support you received from HFC?
SIERRA: The Health Finance Coalition played a pivotal role in helping Be Girl become investment-ready to unlock new financing from GCC. While we had a strong track record in product design and implementation, we needed support to present our financials, growth model, and impact metrics in a way that would resonate with investors. HFC provided hands-on coaching in areas such as refining our financial projections, preparing investor materials, and stress-testing our business model. Just as importantly, they brought sector expertise, helping us articulate our value proposition within the broader health and gender equity landscape. This wasn’t just technical assistance: it was transformative. We were one of three companies selected to receive this support, and it positioned us to successfully close the transaction with GCC and prepare for long-term, scalable growth.
What did you learn through the process?
SIERRA: One of the most important lessons we took from this process was the critical role that financial sustainability plays as a business begins to scale. As a founder with a background in industrial design, I had deep expertise in product development and user needs, but less exposure to the financial frameworks needed for investor confidence and long-term growth. Through the Health Finance Coalition’s support, we gained a deeper understanding of our business from an investor’s perspective, asking and answering questions such as: What should our margins look like? What’s our true cost of goods sold? What does our growth model look like at scale? That insight was transformational. HFC’s support wasn’t generic; it was precise and high impact, more like a tailored consultancy than a typical incubator. We didn’t just leave with a pitch deck; we walked away with a stronger, more financially resilient business model. We also recognized the importance of generating more evidence to strengthen the case for investing in menstrual health. With partners like GCC, who are committed to long-term impact, we’re building momentum. But it’s clear that attracting more investors to this space will require continued proof of impact and commercial viability, and we’re now better equipped to deliver both.
What attracted GCC to Be Girl?
ROWJEE: GCC has been a long-standing partner to Be Girl, supporting their mission since 2018 with early grants aimed at launching and expanding operations in Mozambique. This partnership reflects our broader commitment to advancing menstrual health and backing innovative solutions in the sector. Since our initial investment, Be Girl has made impressive strides, scaling its impact well beyond Mozambique with initiatives in Angola, Ghana, and Egypt. Its impact profile remained strong, with over 1 million menstrual products sold, more than 530,000 youth educated, and five impact studies conducted by the time we considered a reinvestment in late 2024. In May 2025, GCC provided a new catalytic equity investment of $450,000, along with an additional $50,000 in technical assistance funding. This capital will support strategic hires across the organization, accelerate advancements on their online education platform, and launch a Zimbabwe pilot. We’re proud of the progress Be Girl has made and excited to continue our journey together, deepening our partnership to help scale their impact and reach even more communities across Africa.
What factors was GCC looking at to consider an investment with Be Girl?
ROWJEE: We begin every investment conversation with impact. Our lens is always: how many lives will this opportunity reach and improve, and which communities will it serve? Be Girl stands out as a menstrual health innovator that is deeply aligned with our strategy, values, and long-standing commitment to improving women’s health. As mentioned, Be Girl has a strong impact profile with significant lives reached and improved. From a business model perspective, Be Girl’s strength lies in its ability to deliver across the entire value chain by shaping national curricula in collaboration with governments, deploying multilingual educational platforms, and ensuring product access in underserved communities. We’ve also been impressed by their ability to pair innovation with adaptability, successfully shifting from a direct-to-consumer approach to a more scalable business-to-business model. Their leadership was another key strength. With a resilient CEO and a strong team supported by strategic governance and mission alignment, Be Girl has built the capacity needed to grow responsibly and sustainably. As they enter this next chapter, they do so with solid fundamentals, diversified revenue streams, and a healthy growth pipeline.
What will GCC be monitoring or looking for moving forward?
ROWJEE: At GCC, we define success by the real-world impact our investments deliver. We’ll be looking closely at how many products are reaching the hands of those who need them, which communities are being served, and how effectively education is being delivered, particularly in schools. It’s not just about reach, but relevance and equity. Together with Be Girl, we co-develop a clear impact plan and continue to track progress year over year. The goal is to ensure that every dollar we invest contributes to meaningful, measurable change in people’s lives.
What was the role of HFC?
RAO: The project initially began with Be Girl aiming to expand into the MENA and West Africa regions but needing extra capital. We started by doing market research to assess the areas where they wanted to grow and look at the feasibility. From there, HFC worked with Be Girl to refine and enhance their investment pitch deck, highlighting the economic and sector dynamics featuring the countries where they aimed to expand. HFC also helped put together the financial plan. But as the project progressed, HFC recognized there were shifts in the competitive landscape, so instead of prioritizing geographic location, HFC helped Be Girl shift its focus to retaining its existing market share and deepening penetration in its current markets. But that shift also required not only operational adjustments but a reassessment of the financial implications. HFC worked with Be Girl to design a new financial strategy and help to attract investor interest. As a result, HFC was able to help Be Girl demonstrate its ability to adapt to market conditions while maintaining a compelling growth narrative, which strengthened its investment appeal to GCC. Today, we are thrilled that Be Girl has successfully secured a new, substantial investment from Grand Challenges Canada to expand access to their innovative products across Africa. This investment from GCC allows Be Girl to enter a new phase of growth – one that will expand access to Be Girl’s innovative products and life-changing education programs across multiple countries in Africa. As Be Girl puts it, their work is about more than just products – it’s about giving girls power, voice and opportunity. We are proud that with continued support from mission-aligned partners like GCC, Be Girl is well on its way to achieving that vision—one girl, one classroom, one country at a time.
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Investing In Our Future: A Conversation with Noorin Mawani, Co-lead of the Transform Health Fund
In an interview with the Health Finance Coalition, Noorin Mawani, co-lead of the pan-African recently- closed Transform Health Fund (THF), discusses the fund’s innovative blended-finance structure, which aims to bolster healthcare systems in Africa by scaling proven and innovative healthcare models. Earlier this month, AfricInvest and The Health Finance Coalition (HFC) announced the Transform Health Fund exceeded its initial target in its final close, raising $111 million, through commercial, public, and private donor investments.
What makes the Transform Health Fund unique?
MAWANI: What makes the THF unique is its investment strategy that focuses on reaching low to middle income patient populations in Africa which today lack accessible and affordable healthcare
Too often, healthcare investments target companies serving middle- to high-income patients. That’s been for a few reasons: First, investors with high target returns tend to focus on patient populations with a dependable ability to pay. Unfortunately, in many African countries, less than 10% of the population has private health insurance. And while public healthcare systems dominate, many people rely on out-of-pocket payments for medical expenses, and yet to not have the means to cover them. The second reason healthcare investors target companies with higher income patients is geographical. These companies are typically located in large cities and so they are better known.
THF’s focus on low-income patient populations is made possible by a blended capital structure at the Fund level, that allows us to focus on companies expecting moderate returns.
Can you describe how blended financing is used?
MAWANI: With blended financing, different types of capital (with different return requirements) are combined into one fund structure. In more traditional funds, there is just one type of share class for all investors who all receive the same terms.
By combining investors with different risk and return expectations, it is possible to “grow the pie,” or catalyze investors who may not have otherwise had the risk appetite to invest, and providing the opportunity for Africa to see a greater share of international capital flows.
Where does the Transform Health Fund fit into the health financing ecosystem?
MAWANI: The health financing ecosystem is extremely wide, spanning donors who give philanthropic grants to larger institutional players like UNICEF, the US government, PMI Healthcare and many others.
I think about the providers of finance on a continuum of returns. On one extreme, there are those who do not expect even the return of their principal, providing grants and donations. Many are motivated by the belief that the provision of adequate healthcare is a basic human right, and grant financing is sometimes required to help ensure this
In the middle, there are those interested in supporting health in emerging markets given their development impact agenda, who still require a rate of return, but perhaps not a fully market adjusted rate of return. Think of a development finance institution – e.g., BII or IFC. They use limited taxpayer money to drive development in the least developed nations across the world but require a return to sustain their ability to invest.
Moving across the spectrum, the financing available becomes increasingly commercial in nature. Market returns are expected and while impact is an important outcome, it is not necessarily the primary intention of the investment.
This continuum is a necessary feature of the healthcare finance ecosystem. There are some parts of the market, some subsectors, some geographies, where pure commercial investments are unavailable, and philanthropic capital has a critical role to play.
In my view, there is a place for all types of capital – across geographies and across different subsectors. However, it is critical that the right capital is being used for the right kinds of projects. Commercial money should not be used for something that should have been funded by grants, potentially leaving commercial investors disappointed. At the same time, using grant or donor money for a commercial investment is not an efficient use of precious grant dollars.
That’s the challenge for us all making sure we’re matching our capital and the requirements of our capital to the type of risk and expected return of the projects.
What does it mean to be impact focused? And where do you see the most healthcare impact?
MAWANI: For me, being impact focused is basically identifying the kind of impact you’re trying to achieve, and then aligning your internal processes, your fund governance, and your incentives to achieve that objective.
For example, we consider ourselves impactful, because we’ve stated what our impact policy is, and we have a way to govern that. We have an investment committee process that considers impact votes on whether a project is sufficiently impactful.
We also have incentives tied to impact. For our investors and for ourselves, it is not enough to just deliver financial returns and so it is only fair that our incentives are ties to impact.
What challenges exist for scaling healthcare innovations in Africa and deploying capital?
MAWANI: One of the challenges we face, like other sectors in Africa, is the ability to pay. To increase access to healthcare services, either the services must become more affordable or the patient’s ability to pay must improve.
The challenge in Africa is that both of those are difficult. It’s hard to bring down the cost of healthcare, especially since he primary input into the cost of healthcare is labor. There are just not enough trained medical staff on the continent. And even those trained in the medical profession on the continent are tempted to leave for other markets where there’s more financial opportunity.
The other big challenge is the cost of drugs and pharma. Africa doesn’t manufacture adequate supplies of pharmaceutical products for its population and while there are efforts to encourage local production, many barriers still exist: The cost of energy is high, financing isn’t always available, and prices of products from other emerging markets are extremely competitive.
On the other hand, helping to improve a patient’s ability to pay is typically driven by two things: First, increasing income, a variable that it not in the control of healthcare investors. Secondly, increasing the availability of health insurance. While improvements in this regard are underway in some markets, it is a long road, and often requires government intervention and regulatory support.
Despite these important challenges, they are part of what makes African healthcare investing so exciting and such a big opportunity.
That’s where the innovation comes from, particularly companies targeting decreases in the customer cost of care.
With this final close, would it be fair to say you’re optimistic?
MAWANI: Definitely. I think we’re very optimistic because of achieving this final close of THF for an amount surpassing our target. As you can see, the is a great deal of interest and drive from investors to finance companies providing innovative solutions to some of Africa’s most pressing healthcare challenges.
And from the investments we’ve made so far, we’ve found incredible opportunities to solve for affordability. Still, this is by no means an easy sector. But we’ve found really strong entrepreneurs who are finding ways to drive innovation.
Finally, we are inspired by our investors, because at the end of the day, we’re a conduit for their money. It’s still their money and they’re still taking the risk.
So, our optimism is driven by both investors, as well as the hard work being done by the entrepreneurs themselves. While we are pleased with the success of the Transform Health Fund, investors and entrepreneurs are really the ones that are going to solve Africa’s healthcare problem.
Financing is just one piece of the puzzle that we try to unlock for them.
Q: Can you talk about Health Finance Coalition’s Transaction construction role in the fund? How does HFC’s support enhance THF’s investment process?
MAWANI: The Health Finance Coalition (HFC) plays a crucial role in structuring transactions that drive the development and execution of investment opportunities, strengthening THF’s pipeline, value proposition to companies, impact, and overall fund performance. HFC provides healthcare companies with strategic, financial, impact, and transaction structuring support, offering customized solutions that enhance their readiness to attract investment from partners like THF.
A recent example of this work is HFC’s collaboration with THF’s investee – Lapaire, an optical retailer operating across Africa. HFC assisted Lapaire in assessing strategic, high-impact opportunities designed to generate sustainable financial and social outcomes. By aligning management on the optimal strategic growth path, HFC helped Lapaire maximize impact while safeguarding THF’s investment value.
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