Hi everyone, I will be at the IESE Search Fund Conference next month and wanted to introduce myself. I am an IESE MBA preparing to raise search capital in Q1 2027 for an ETA vehicle in Francophone West Africa: Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Benin, and Togo. My background is a decade in corporate finance, much of it in industrial manufacturing in France, two years leading finance operations in Abidjan, and a role at the Africa Finance Corporation during my MBA as Summer Associate and then Investment Professional Intern in the CIO Office. The standard ETA playbook assumes databases, brokers, and public comps. The West African monetary union (WAEMU) has none of the three, and that friction is where the opportunity lies: ➤ No broker network = proprietary sourcing, with no intermediated auction and no banked process. ➤ No Grata or SourceScrub coverage = the pipeline belongs to whoever maps it locally. ➤ One commercial code (OHADA), one central bank, and a currency pegged to the euro = none of the FX volatility that usually deters frontier allocations. I have spent the past months on the origination groundwork: hand-filtering targets out of national statistical registers, analyzing investment codes, and mapping regional PE portfolios for exit bottlenecks. I am here to learn as much as to contribute, and would value meeting: • Searchers in emerging and frontier markets (LatAm, MENA, SE Asia, Central and Eastern Europe) who have navigated thin data, family succession, and local debt, including those who faced the realities of not closing. • Investors backing international searchers, and institutions curious how the model will be executed inside an euro-pegged bloc. I arrive in Barcelona a day or two before the conference and am there for both days. Happy to meet over coffee or dinner beforehand, or to compare notes here. Best, Gaël-Germain Godonou