There is a large pile of literature for entrepreneurs on how to raise funds, the things to do and the mistakes to avoid. A lack of funding is the main cause of failures, and mastering the dos and don’ts is paramount in this area. Yet, almost nothing exists for fund managers. If you want to raise your own funds few resources exist, and it is even more difficult when you want to raise an “impact” …
A question I keep getting back to is: why do family offices and development institutions in Europe contribute increasingly to impact investing funds, and the ones in MENA don’t (ok, I only ask myself this question some times, I do have other concerns going on in my life). As far as I know, I have never seen foundations from (wealthy) Gulf states putting money in the impact investing sector. I have not encountered any. Maybe, most …
So many new online “impact investing” platforms were launched recently e.g Swell Investing, Open Invest and Motif. The premise is the same and a bit familiar by now: Millennials value impact and meaning in their investing decisions but no accessible solutions are available for them. Let’s forget for now about the existence of various crowdfunding platforms already enabling this (such as Trine, Lendahand, and Wiseed), and focus on the fact that Swell and others are supported by big groups- …
As a practitioner of impact investing, I have seen a multitude of fund proposals with debt investments as core focus – more commonly called “debt funds”. What do they have in common and what do you need to get right when assessing them? The rationale behind debt funds: While some of them might also conduct a limited number of equity investments, their main investment strategy consists in providing (private) debt to businesses and financial institutions …
As some of you know already, starting last November, I decided to move to a new sector for a one-year assignment (and a new city, I am now most of the time in Brussels) focusing on financing early stage projects in renewable energy across Africa, Asia and Latin America. I am sharing here, after three months, few observations: – Large opportunities: driven by absence of the grid in a large part of Africa, but also …
I designed this today after a tense discussion with my investment committee. I think it captures quite well our daily trilemmas. You cannot have more than two.
Probably one of my last article on the topic as I am moving to the off-green energy space (non -MFI), I hope you enjoy! If you’re an impact investor, you probably want to do more in “green”. For instance, impact investing in microfinance, which constitutes a large portion of impact investing writ large, rarely incorporates environmental sustainability. You might think, my second bottom line is to help lower-income households get better access to financial services, …
As impact investors, we need to be careful at some of unwanted but serious consequences of our investments that can go fully against the initial intentions. Take investing in Microfinance for instance. The social bottom line is financial inclusion, i.e helping undeserved segment get access to better financial services including credit. If, as investors, we keep pushing money in saturated markets, then the underlying MFIs will keep deploying credit, probably lending in less stringent and …