Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes is the Founder and Managing Partner of Aruwa Capital Management, one of the few woman owned and led private equity funds in Africa investing into untapped investment opportunities in West Africa in the small to lower mid-market. She has over 13 years of investment banking and private equity experience from top global institutions.
Prior to founding Aruwa Capital, she spent five years as Managing Partner of Syntaxis Capital Africa, a provider of growth capital to SMEs in Nigeria and across Sub Saharan Africa. Syntaxis Africa was part of Syntaxis Capital, a private equity fund active in other emerging markets with $300 million in AUM from global institutional investors. At Syntaxis Africa, she led transactions totalling more than $200 million across SSA. Prior to co-founding Syntaxis Africa in 2014, Adesuwa was in the Leveraged Finance and M&A teams at J.P. Morgan in London, where she was involved in $5.6 billion worth of transactions across emerging markets including Nigeria.
She was named as an Agent of Impact in 2019 by Impact Alpha and also recognised as one of the Top 35 Women Moving Africa Forward for her commitment to gender equality in private equity and across the society through Aruwa Capital’s investments. She started her career at Lehman Brothers and holds a BSc in Economics from the University of Bristol. She currently sits on a number of boards in Nigeria across healthcare, agriculture, and hospitality sectors.
