Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes belongs to a new generation of African financiers rewriting who gets to allocate capital on the continent. As Founder and Managing Partner of Aruwa Capital Management, she has built one of West Africa’s most closely watched gender-lens investment firms, and became the only female fund manager in Nigeria to raise more than $10 million in a first institutional fund, a milestone reached in 2022. Today she oversees more than $40 million across two funds, backing high-growth businesses in essential sectors from healthcare to consumer goods.
Her ascent has been deliberate. Rhodes began at Lehman Brothers before joining J.P. Morgan’s Leveraged Finance and M&A teams in London, where she worked on some $6 billion of transactions across emerging markets. A spell at the Africa-focused private equity firm TLG Capital followed, before she co-founded Syntaxis Capital Africa in 2014.
In founding Aruwa, she set out to prove a thesis global investors had overlooked: that women-led and women-serving businesses in Africa represent one of the market’s most compelling, and underfunded, opportunities. The results have made her one of the sector’s most decorated leaders, named Private Equity Africa’s Female Founder in 2024 and 2X Global’s Woman Fund Manager of the Year in 2023, and ranked by Institut Choiseul among the top 100 global leaders under 40 for three consecutive years. A University of Bristol economics graduate, she has become a byword for what African capital, deployed with conviction, can achieve.
