Building the Next Generation: Inside the Black Investment Associate Program Retreat 2026
A strategic intervention in South Africa’s investment landscape confronts the hard truths of transformation, capability building, and patient capital
In mid-January 2026, twenty-four emerging investment professionals gathered at Mount Grace Hotel in Magaliesburg for the Black Investment Associate Program Retreat. Organised by the SA SME Fund in partnership with the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation, the two-day convening was a deliberate exercise in confronting the distance between aspiration and execution in South Africa’s investment ecosystem.
What distinguished this gathering was the quality of honesty that pervaded the discussions: about what it actually takes to raise capital, about the structural barriers facing black professionals in private markets, and about the uncomfortable gap between policy ambitions and lived commercial realities.
The Weight of Patient Capital
The opening session set the tone. Tishanya Naidoo, a fund manager who has navigated the transition from quantitative modelling to fund leadership, offered what she called her “startup journey success story” though the telling was anything but triumphant in the conventional sense.
It took three years to raise her fund. Three years during which there were periods with no viable options in the pipeline, forcing her team to return to the drawing board and restart conversations that had gone nowhere. She described being a “one-man wolf pack” for an extended period, and noted that potential investors typically required three separate conversations before they would consider the fund as a serious opportunity rather than a “CSI thing” corporate social investment by another name.
This candour landed differently in a room of professionals grappling with their own career trajectories. The DSTI’s patient capital, Naidoo acknowledged, served as a “game changer” during the most precarious moments. The subsequent validation from the SA SME Fund opened doors that had previously remained closed.
The discussion surfaced a tension that would recur throughout the retreat: whether emerging black fund managers can build sustainable careers without structural support addressing their capital disadvantages, while simultaneously developing the capabilities that justify institutional confidence.
The People Business
Day Two opened with Dr Zuko Kubukeli, CEO and Managing Partner of PAPEfunds, whose firm has raised R3.9 billion, completed 68 deals, and executed 54 exits across nearly two decades. His central message was that private equity is fundamentally a people business a claim that sounds obvious until one examines its implications.
He emphasised deep, sustained reading as non-negotiable, noting that Warren Buffett dedicates approximately six hours daily to newspapers, books, and reports. “Trolling through social media does not count as reading.” But the more striking element concerned the relational dimensions of investment work. He spoke of “looking in the whites of people’s eyes” to gauge authenticity, of visiting companies to observe whether the kitchen is clean or the grass is cut details that reveal management quality in ways no financial model can capture.
Dr Kubukeli described PAPE as “an overnight success that actually took 17 years.” When asked what he would do differently, his response revealed a sophisticated critique of the private equity model itself: he would gravitate toward “permanent capital.” In a typical ten-year fund cycle, he explained, it takes two to three years simply to understand a business. “Just as you become an expert, the fund mandate forces an exit.” This perspective carries particular weight in the South African context, where the pressure to demonstrate returns within conventional timelines often conflicts with the longer-term work of building transformative companies.
Graham Fehrsen’s session approached professional development from a different angle, focusing on personal capabilities required to survive an industry defined by uncertainty, rejection, and long feedback loops. His framework centred on purpose, lifelong learning, resilience, and influence alongside the biological foundations of sleep, relationships, and grounding practices.
The discussion of the Dunning-Kruger effect prompted revealing exchanges. Fehrsen argued that “foolishness is the key to learning” and that asking questions demonstrates curiosity rather than incompetence. A senior participant added that younger professionals should study the structure of investment committee papers examining headings on industry analysis, team assessment, and revenue projections to gradually build confidence to contribute meaningfully.
Confronting the Ivory Tower
Ryan Harrison’s introduction to the group activity was notable for its institutional self-criticism. He acknowledged that the SA SME Fund had previously adopted an “ivory tower approach,” designing interventions without consulting those working within the system. The results had often been poor.
His examples were specific. Contractual transformation requirements in early funds had “failed by 95 percent” because subscale funds could not afford to pay quality talent more than approximately R20,000 monthly making the career gamble unappealing for the very people the programme sought to attract. Accelerator programmes launched without ecosystem consultation were “absolute disasters.”
The lesson: successful interventions emerge from the sector’s lived experience rather than external diagnosis. Participants were tasked with developing both a “system intervention” and a “personal intervention” expressed in “I will” statements to establish individual ownership.
What the Associates See
The group presentations revealed sophisticated analysis alongside continuing tensions between desirable and achievable outcomes.
One group identified fragmentation across the investment landscape as a primary barrier, proposing a national dialogue to ensure stakeholders understand their roles in the value chain. The panel challenged the premise directly: the ecosystem is “dramatically less fragmented” than eight years ago. The real gaps lie on the institutional side, pension funds and trustees and in seed funding specifically.
Another group focused on insufficient high-quality black-founded businesses reaching venture capital readiness, diagnosing that incubators prioritise graduate numbers over developing fundable capabilities. The panel noted that of South Africa’s approximately 80 incubators, 69 have never produced a company capable of raising R10 million. Associates were challenged to develop quality standard documents themselves rather than delegating upward.
The most ambitious proposal was a R100 million seed fund managed collectively by the 24 associates closing the gap between grant funding and venture capital investability while building measurable track records. The panel described this as “dumb money” in the analytical sense: capital invested primarily in the future development of managers rather than immediate commercial returns.
The Distance Still to Travel
The retreat did not resolve the fundamental tensions it surfaced. The gap between the support emerging black fund managers require and the commercial track records justifying institutional confidence remains wide. The subscale nature of South Africa’s venture capital ecosystem continues to constrain the economics of transformation.
What the retreat accomplished was naming these tensions clearly and creating space for practitioners at different career stages to engage with them honestly. Naidoo’s three-year fundraising journey and Kubukeli’s seventeen-year “overnight success” calibrated expectations. Fehrsen’s focus on resilience acknowledged the psychological demands that technical training does not prepare one for. Harrison’s willingness to catalogue the SA SME Fund’s failures established that learning from error is institutional as well as individual.
The Black Investment Associate Program represents a bet on a particular theory of change: that systematically developing capable black investment professionals can eventually achieve the transformation that direct interventions have largely failed to deliver. The programme’s success cannot be measured on the timescale of a single retreat. It will be measured in decades, in the composition of investment committees that do not yet exist, and in companies built by managers still learning their craft.
That is the nature of patient capital applied to human development.
The Black Investment Associate Program Retreat 2026 was held 15–16 January at Mount Grace Hotel, Magaliesburg, organised by the SA SME Fund in partnership with the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation.
