Andriette Richards is a consultant Risk Officer at the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF).

She is an investment professional with over 20 years of experience covering corporate, development, and impact finance roles across Sub-Saharan Africa and the MENA region. She began her career in private and investment banking in South Africa, gaining experience in corporate finance and M&A transactions in various sectors. In 2008, she started her development finance career after joining the National Empowerment Fund, a national development financier, as an Investment Officer. In 2011, she moved to PROPARCO to expand her experience to cover infrastructure, financial institutions, and MAS transactions across Southern Africa. She then joined GroFin in Mauritius as Investor Relations Officer, where she was responsible for fundraising for existing funds and developing new funds and projects incorporating development impact and blended finance in the design and structures. In 2020, she became an independent consultant and have fulfilled various advisory mandates on both the demand and supply sides of development and impact capital in sectors such as healthcare, agriculture, clean energy and MSMEs.

Andriette joined the UNCDF Investment Specialist team in 2021 to appraise transactions under the BUILD Fund. In her current role as a consultant Risk Officer, she plays a key role in UNCDF’s transactional risk team, conducting risk evaluations of prospective loan and guarantee transactions across the Least Developed Countries where UNCDF operates.

A South African national, Andriette holds an MBA (cum laude) from the Gordon Institute of Business Science.