Christina Clark-Lowes is the Investment Practice Lead at Nathan’s London office specialized in investment, private sector development, investment promotion, market systems development (MSD) and SME support. For more than a decade, Ms. Clark-Lowes has been providing strategic and technical support to economic growth projects throughout their project cycle, ranging from design to implementation and evaluation.

Amongst others, Ms. Clark-Lowes is the Investment Lead of the Invest Salone project in Sierra Leone, where she is overseeing the implementation of all investment-related interventions. These include the structuring of Sierra Leone’s first-ever corporate bond working together with the Bank of Sierra Leone, design of an innovative first-loss-guaranteed working capital facility, design of a Climate Finance investment promotion activity as well as continued impact investor outreach in fragile states and least developed countries.

Previously, she was the Project Director of the MarketConnect project in Zambia where she led on the strategic and technical direction of the project. MarketConnect pioneered the first use of royalty payments by SMEs in East Africa, whereby SMEs who received TA and became more profitable paid back a percentage of their profit to an escrow account devised by Nathan, located at the Government of Zambia. Christina set up this facility and worked directly with SMEs, supporting them on their growth path to become more competitive, increase profitability and turnover, linking them to new buyers on a national, regional and international level, and becoming more attractive to investors by improving their investment readiness.

From 2016 until 2022, Ms. Clark-Lowes has been providing technical and strategic support to the Land Investment for Transformation (LIFT) programme in Ethiopia, which applied a market systems lens to a land programme in the rural areas of Ethiopia’s highlands. In her role she supported the design, implementation and evaluation of interventions that leverage increased tenure security to increase investments. Interventions ranged from access to finance and specific loan products for land holders and piloting multi-peril crop insurance products, to establishing a transparent and formalized rural land rental market, as well as commercially driven agricultural input markets. In addition, it successfully introduced a number of policy changes in the country, including the ability to collateralize rural land for rural smallholder farmers.