African Rivers Fund (ARF), managed by the Dutch fund manager XSML, has made its first investment in Institut Aurora, an education provider in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Focusing on lower middle and middle class households, Institut Aurora offers an affordable internationally recognized education program for both the French and English speaking population of Kinshasa.

Institut Aurora offers nursery, primary and secondary education.

The school offers both a French Lycee curriculum as well as an English IB and a Montessori program.

Jayshree Aurora, Managing Director of Aurora, said: “Our goal is to offer high quality French and English primary and secondary education at affordable rates to enable our students to get trained according to the highest international IB education standards as well as the French Lycee system.”

“This helps them to be well prepared for an academic or professional life afterwards. As capacity of the current school facility is limited, we need to add additional class rooms and facilities as quickly as possible to cater for the demand from the students,” she said.

In the last decades, education has been heavily affected by various crises sustained by the DRC.

For years there has been insufficient public sector investment in education, leading to a lack of supply by existing schools.

Despite the increasing supply via public and private institutions, who offer national and international programs, there continues to be a large deficit in affordable, quality education.

Barthout van Slingelandt, Managing Partner at XSML, said: “The success of Aurora demonstrates the strong demand for quality primary and secondary education in Congo DRC. While we invested with our first fund in the school when it just started, with our second fund we are able to finance the next step of its growth tripling capacity of the school from 500 to 1,500 students.”

“The education sector in Congo has tremendous growth potential and long term capital is scarce. By providing this long term capital we enable the school to grow in its own purpose built premises - a good learning environment for Aurora’s students,” he said.

ARF targets growing, well-managed small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Central and East-African region covering Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Republic of Congo as well as Burundi and Central African Republic (CAR).

The fund, which had its first close at $50m in Q1, 2016, follows the successful investment strategy of its predecessor, the Central Africa SME Fund (CASF), by providing debt, equity and mezzanine finance to fast-growing companies in the Central African region.

The African Rivers Fund continues CASF’s strategy with investments in between $200,000 and $5m.

All three current investors in CASF, IFC (a member of the World Bank Group), FMO (the Dutch development bank) and Lundin Foundation (Canadian foundation), are joined by BIO (Belgium Investment Company for Developing Countries), CDC Group (the UK development finance institution), Dutch Good Growth Fund (DGGF) and FISEA (AFD Group) - an expansion of the investor base of the African Rivers Fund.