Mélanie Keïta boosts African businesses via strategy, brand growth, SME training, and creator media platforms.
Mélanie Keïta built her career moving through some of the world’s most important financial and development hubs in Paris, Nairobi, and Frankfurt. She spent more than a decade working in corporate finance, fundraising, and impact assessment.
As a French-Senegalese professional, she worked with organisations such as the United Nations, Investisseurs et Partenaires, and Finance in Motion, gaining firsthand insight into how African entrepreneurs struggle to access capital even when their businesses create real social and environmental value.
Her academic training complemented this experience, including a Master’s in Corporate Finance, an MSc in International Sustainability, and microfinance expertise. This comprehensive background provided her with a profound grasp of how financial systems are structured, who benefits from them, and which groups are frequently marginalised.
Over time, the pattern became impossible to ignore. Keïta continued to see the same kinds of companies (innovative, locally grounded, and impact-driven) being denied financing simply because traditional banks could not evaluate them properly. African startups were actively developing initiatives in clean energy, sustainable agriculture, waste reduction, and green supply chains. However, the climate impact of these efforts was not being acknowledged as a valuable asset.
That realisation set the stage for Melanin Kapital. Instead of watching these businesses struggle to survive, Keïta built a financial system that finally understood and valued their contribution. This vision became the foundation of Africa’s first blockchain-backed carbon neobank.
Founding Melanin Kapital
Melanin Kapital is a neobank that uses carbon credits to provide financing to small businesses in Africa. It offers green asset financing, invoice financing, and pre-financing of carbon projects to help businesses that cannot meet traditional bank revenue requirements.
Melanin Kapital didn’t start as a climate-fintech company; it began as a crowd-lending platform. However, as Keïta and her team delved deeper, they found that many African SMEs were generating verifiable carbon reductions that could be measured, certified, and monetised. These reductions could serve as collateral, which meant SMEs could access loans even with limited credit histories. This insight changed everything, prompting a pivot toward a model that combines blockchain transparency, financial inclusion, and climate finance.
Today, the neobank operates through three tightly linked components. Its business-banking facility offers receivables financing starting from $50,000, unsecured working-capital loans of up to $500,000, and carbon-backed term loans of up to $1 million, all with interest rates around 10 to 15 per cent.
Its carbon trading desk verifies, prices, and sells carbon credits produced by SMEs’ emission-reduction projects, ensuring alignment with global standards. And its technical assistance facility helps them prepare carbon projects, develop aggregated initiatives, and scale through carbon-verification processes, with costs recovered through future credit revenue.
This ecosystem has already produced significant results. Melanin Kapital has deployed more than $1.5 million across Eastern Africa and Nigeria, especially in the agriculture and renewable-energy sectors. The financing supports electric vehicles, solar systems, clean-cooking equipment, waste-management tools, and other technologies that reduce emissions while strengthening business growth.
The company’s long-term vision is equally ambitious: catalysing $5 billion in carbon financing, enabling one million SMEs to access $1 billion in green credit, and reducing 50 million tons of CO₂ emissions by 2030.
Mélanie Keïta has earned substantial recognitions, including Forbes 30 Under 30 (2021), the Hewlett Packard Foundation Award for climate innovation (2022), AfricArena Awards for Most Promising Entrepreneur and Most Promising Startup, the GITEX Top Africa Awards, the UBS Women in Fintech Awards, and the Ecobank Fintech Challenge in 2024.
She also teaches sustainability and finance at ESCP Europe, and mentors founders in accelerator programs.
