Ziwani’s podcast series Big Change: How Ordinary Christians Change Their World explores how Christians can drive significant change in society. Jonathan Wilson is co-founder and Managing Partner at ThirdWay Capital, a venture holding company investing in and scaling small-to-medium businesses in sub-Saharan Africa. Alison Klein is Managing Director of Akmazo, an independent advisory firm supporting investors through strategy, due diligence and investment selection. This summary was written by Lise-Marie Keyser, and you can listen to the full episode here.
Introduction
Business is often assumed to be purely about profit – about getting the best return for shareholders, maximising efficiency, and competing for market share. But what if we stepped back and asked deeper questions? What if we reimagined business not as a mechanism for extracting value, but as a tool for serving people, stewarding resources, and participating in God’s renewing work in the world?
In this conversation Jonathan and Alison explore a more expansive view of business – shaped by faith, grounded in experience, and inspired by a vision for human flourishing.
Is ‘business’ a dirty word?
“Is business grubby? Is it dirty? Or does it actually have a role to play in bringing about a flourishing society?” asks Jonathan Wilson of Alison Klein, his guest on the Big Change podcast series.
A private equity investor with more than 20 years’ experience in both developed and emerging markets, Alison played a leading role at the Nederlandse Financierings-Maatschappij voor Ontwikkelingslanden (FMO, the Dutch development bank) before founding Akmazo, an independent impact investing advisory firm. “In essence, business is about producing goods and services in an organised way,” Alison responds. “Yes, it’s about making money, but does that mean there is anything intrinsically wrong with it? No. We’ve always produced things to meet the needs of people – things that make life possible by providing food, shelter, clothing and so on. Along the way money evolved as a useful tool to facilitate commerce across distance and time.”
Business enables people to feed their families, to build a better future, and to interact meaningfully with the world around them. “But we have to acknowledge that capitalism unchecked can easily devolve into exploitation – including the unfair treatment of labour, the reckless misuse of natural resources, or other unethical business practices,” she continues. “If we can guard against the love of money, business can be considered an outworking of stewardship.”
We all have assumptions about business
Such a positive outlook is rare, however. Jonathan mentions that as an investment professional he is regularly confronted with the view that the purpose of business is to make as much money as possible, and that being too good-hearted will compromise its effectiveness.
“The assumption is that if we invest capital in businesses that are strongly focused on good social outcomes or addressing environmental problems, then we automatically have to settle for below average financial performance,” he elaborates. “This is why I dislike the term ‘concessionary capital’ because it comes across as defeatist. To concede not only implies that I am reluctantly giving up money in return for some good social outcomes, it also implies that financial outcomes are always superior to other outcomes.”
Alison says that the term ‘impact investing’ is subject to a similar assumption – that it refers to pursuing social impact instead of, or at the expense of, financial return. “But the term is vague enough to describe virtually any risk-return-impact combination. And those who own the capital have the freedom to determine how they wish to invest it, don’t they?” she points out. “If they make an intentional decision to deploy their capital in a certain way, that is not defeatist, but purposeful.”
Assumptions can be based on distorted thinking
Jonathan reiterates that business is not inherently bad, adding that this perception exists because “we’ve allowed distorted thinking to shape our ideas about business, and those ideas have led to deeply distorted practices and behaviours.” “The problem is that we often don’t know what our assumptions are,” Alison points out. “Only when these are challenged do we realise that something we’ve accepted as a foundational truth, might be only one perspective.”
Many modern-day assumptions are still rooted in theories put forward by influential economists from the distant past. Adam Smith (1723 – 1790) for example, argued that self-interest is the key driver in business because it creates a competitive economy that allows individuals to perform their best and increase personal gain. Milton Friedman (1912 – 2006) argued that the main responsibility of a business is to increase revenue and maximise shareholder returns.
“To this day anyone who has been to a mainstream business school probably believes these theories,” Alison states, “and may not ever have questioned profit maximisation as the ultimate purpose of business. They know that business uses capital and labour to produce products, but these are simply seen as tools to maximise quarterly or annual returns.”
Profit maximisation and value creation
Where does profitability come from in the first place? From value creation, according to Jonathan. “Adam Smith said it requires a self-centredness to drive business, but I would argue that a key dimension of business is actually an other-centredness. Value creation at its best happens when a business pays closest attention to its customer.”
Alison highlights that the narrow focus on shareholder value or share price is a reductionist view – even of profit itself. That a profitable business is about much more. That reducing everything to one number creates all kinds of unintended consequences because people are incentivised to manipulate the outcome. “I remember one business where salespeople were paid purely based on volume of sales,” she says. “Yes, they hit their target, but they drove sales to customers who couldn’t pay, or structured deals in ways that lost money. So the business grew on paper, but in reality it was unsustainable.”
“Profit maximisation is such a fuzzy idea when you really dig into it,” Jonathan comments. “Against what benchmark? Over what time horizon? We saw the consequences of this vagueness in 2008 when the ‘clever’ pursuit of profit, without grounding, led to massive value destruction worldwide.” Efficiency in business can be damaging if it’s driven by greed. But if it’s driven by a commitment to people and the planet, it can create robust, scalable solutions.
The need to reorient our thinking
The reality is that our thinking is so often distorted by fear, ego, and self-interest – affecting how we perceive value and make decisions. “But when we’ve been set free through Christ, we can learn to see more clearly and act more justly, and transform the systems we operate in,” Jonathan encourages. As the apostle Paul writes in Colossians 2:6–8: “So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him… See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition… rather than on Christ.”
These human traditions include the underlying assumptions that shape our understanding of business, value, capital and risk. “Therefore we have to take seriously the task of interrogating our thinking,” he comments. Alison adds that engaging in a different culture or stepping into a different industry can force us to question our assumptions – in a good way. “Every system reflects a set of beliefs. Stepping out of the system we normally operate in enables us to question those beliefs and ask, ‘Is this consistent with biblical values?’”
The good business can do in Africa
One aspect of business that Jonathan finds useful is that it has built-in accountability mechanisms – if you don’t provide value for money, customers will eventually walk away. “When the person who benefits is the person who pays, it makes for tighter feedback loops and increased efficiency,” he says. By contrast, in the non-profit world the buyer (donor) and the beneficiary are usually different people, which weakens the accountability mechanism and creates its own set of distortions. “In Africa, where there’s been a lot of aid and donor intervention, we’ve seen that disconnect,” he says. “What if deploying capital through business could deliver the impact we all long for?”
Alison admits that there are times when aid is necessary – especially during a crisis. “But as a long-term development strategy, it often creates dependency. There’s broader and more lasting impact when capital goes into business versus being spent on aid, which is typically consumed and then is gone.” By providing stable employment and opportunities for personal growth, as well as contributing to tax revenues and supporting a local economy, business can become a sustainable platform for long-term community transformation.
“Impact investing is about solving problems, and seeing those problems as opportunities,” Alison asserts. “Renewable energy, agriculture, financial services, healthcare – there are so many areas where capital can have positive social impact and do well financially. And investors don’t all have to take the same level of risk. Some may provide catalytic capital, others might invest in more established firms. But the key is to start asking: What impact do I want to see? What kind of world do I want to help build?”
A new kind of partnership
“Of course, when we talk about investing in Africa, we’re also dealing with the legacy of exploitative behaviour – by foreign powers and local leaders alike. There are social and political headwinds, and there’s a lack of infrastructure. All these factors must be taken into account,” Jonathan acknowledges. Still, there are stable parts of the continent that present incredible opportunity. “It’s important that we don’t lump an entire continent into one risk profile, but rather take a more nuanced and specific approach to what is required in each location,” he clarifies. “If you understand the local market, you can be highly successful in that context.”
That understanding also calls for a new kind of partnership – one that recognises the dynamics of power that capital can carry. In 2023, a group of Christian impact investors articulated this vision in the Nairobi Declaration, rejecting “the perversion and abuse of power within our own societies, whether it be on the basis of tribe, race, creed, gender, or wealth” and instead committing to “mutual submission and towards equal partnership in power, value, and respect between investors and frontier market operators” in pursuit of solving problems.
“It’s a bold reimagining of what investing can look like, especially in Africa,” Alison reflects. “It confronts the assumption that the one who has the money calls the shots. True partnership means seeing each other as peers on the journey – not as superiors and subordinates.”
Conclusion
“The marketplace is where the average person is simply trying to make life work,” Jonathan reminds us. “It’s a significant force in society. And when we come to the table with some humility, we open the door to real transformation. Not just of systems, but of ourselves. Ultimately, this is about letting God reorient our thinking, our assumptions and our decisions.” That’s stewardship. That’s aligning capital with purpose. That’s a way for business to be a reconciliatory force in the world, not just a profit-seeking one.
