Andia Chakava

Investment Director
Graca Machel Trust

Andia Chakava is the Investment Director at the Graca Machel Trust to drive the organization’s gender lens investing initiative and is leading the team to create a Pan African women’s investment fund. Andia is one of the first female fund managers in the East Africa region and has been instrumental in the set up of two fund management companies from scratch in Kenya (Old Mutual Investment Services and Alpha Africa Asset Managers) where she served in each as Managing Director. She is also the founding Chairperson of New Faces New Voices Kenya chapter (women in finance network) and is the founding principal of AC Advisory. She is passionate and skilled at facilitating intra Africa investment, championing women’s economic empowerment and creating strategic alliances to promote gendered financial impact. She was the lead consultant in a 2017 publication by the Graca Machel Trust on the ‘Growth barriers affecting women entrepreneurs in East Africa.’

She is a non-executive director of Sterling Investment Bank, East African Educational Publishers and is a former board member of Echo network Africa ( formerly Kenya women holding ). She is an investment advisory council member of Canada’s Equality Fund and investment committee member of OPES LCEF Restart fund. She has over 17 years’ experience in fund management and over 7 years of driving women economic empowerment goals. In 2014 and 2018 she was named Africa’s most influential woman in financial services by CEO magazine and in 2018 won the National Diar Inclusion and Diversity Business Executive champion award in Kenya. In 2019 she was named as a ‘woman to watch’ by Forbes magazine in 2020.

She holds a Master of Business Administration in Finance with merit from Cass Business School in London and an honours degree in Economics from York University in Toronto. She enjoys travelling, imparting knowledge and bikram yoga.