As some investors have backed away from emerging markets in dealmaking, Emerging Capital Partners (as its name implies) has not shied away from making deals to support developing nations’ industries at a time when the global economy has teetered on uncertainty. ECP’s latest play—a $25 million investment in East African media and telecom company Wanachi Group Holdings—suggests the private equity firm remains committed to fulfilling its mandates.

Wanachi serves retail and corporate markets in Kenya and Tanzania; the company provides TV and Internet hookups across a number of platforms. Tom Gibian, the chief executive of ECP, said the African mobile services market is ripe and that demand there has a growing capacity to support companies like Wanachi.

Emerging Capital is using six funds worth more than $1 billion to make investments in Africa. It already has a stake in a similar West African communications company, Cellcom, through its ECP Africa Fund II PCC fund. That fund, and its Central Africa Growth Star fund, joined to invest in telecom company MTN Cote d’Ivoire, a cellular communications provider in Cote d’Ivoire. ECP’s Central Africa Growth Star fund also invested, independently, in Zain Gabon, another Central African telecom provider.

But ECP has diversified its investments across dozens of companies through its multiple funds. In 2008, the private equity firm took $15.9 million from its $150 million 2007 ECP MENA Growth Fund to buy a controlling stake in BACIM Bank, the seventh-largest bank in Mauritania. That year, the firm also spent $47.3 million to invest in Societe d’Articles Hygieniques to help the Tunisian company ramp up sales in other African nations. In July 2008, ECP acquired a controlling stake in Salt Investment S.A., a Djibouti-based salt production company.

Advisors have taken note in rising optimism in emerging markets investments.

Fasken Martineau announced this week that the Canadian law firm will merge with Gravel, Leclerc & Partners, one of France’s leading business transactional firms. The firm also hired away four Dewey & LeBoeuf attorneys in a move that will also boost its presence in Africa.

No comment was provided by press time.

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