Genevieve Hennessy-Barrett

4G Capital

Genevieve is the Director of Impact, Board Director, and co-founder of 4G Capital, a mission-focused financial inclusion fintech that delivers working capital loans and business training to micro and small enterprises in Kenya and Uganda.

In her roles at 4G Capital, Genevieve is responsible for delivering 4G Capital’s mission to grow business with capital and knowledge. She also leads on the ESG matters, focusing on building impact-oriented partnerships and collating, producing, and strategically responding to the quarterly impact reports.

Passionate about finding new ways to provide world-class responsible lending practices and prevent over-indebtedness, some of Genevieve’s achievements at 4G Capital include the leadership of multiple COVID relief programmes, a long term partnership with Refushe to train and mentor refugee girls, obtaining B Corp Certification, achieving the highest ESG score for any financial institution in Africa, multiple “B-Corp Best for the World” awards, and being named one of the Top 25 Women Leaders in Financial Technology of 2022.

She also coordinated a pilot at 4G Capital to test digital lending standards and worked with SPTF and CGAP on the development of a Financial Stress Early Warning System, a tool that predicts the onset of a financial stress spike among communities. 4G Capital subsequently included the tool in its disbursement process for every customer, giving real-time insights into customer experience in order to provide optimum protection from debt-stress.