Impact Investing News

I’ve been working on investing with a women and girls focus for a long time. And my husband has been working on his running for a long time. He’s an ultra-marathoner – a good one. He’s both a natural, and he works at it. What do these things have to do with each other? It’s about practising, […]

Women’s rights and empowerment are receiving renewed global policy attention: The United Nations’ 20th anniversary of the World Conference of Women and the “Sustainable Development Goals” have enshrined the global goal of gender equality. Another global trend is also capturing the spotlight: More than 2,000 individuals and 400 organizations, representing more than $2.6 trillion in assets […]

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is adding talent to create innovative financing structures for what it calls a “critical juncture” for international development. Nick O’Donohoe, most recently the head of Big Society Capital in the UK, will join the world’s largest private foundation in January as senior adviser for blended finance. The new UN-backed sustainable development goals, aimed at ending poverty […]

What, where, when and how impact capital flowed this week…See more impact deals in ImpactAlpha’s DealFlow section. Send your dealflow news to info@impactalpha.com. Mexican impact fund raises via public markets. Venture capital firm IGNIA has reached a $90 million first close on its second fund with commitments from domestic pension funds. The Mexican pension funds, which were […]

As the risks of failing to invest in responses to climate change become clear, pension funds and other big private investors are taking advantage of innovative financing mechanisms to move forward with hundreds of millions of dollars to fund climate solutions. As next month’s pivotal climate conference in Paris approaches, the commitments to the new “climate funds” represent […]

From a Kampachi tuna farm in Baja California, Mexico, to a seafood distributor in Vanuatu in the south Pacific, to a Chilean company that recycles fishing gear into trendy lifestyle products, to indoor vegetables farms growing on fish waste in London, the winners of the Fish2.0 business competition showcased global innovation in sustainable seafood. “I’m impressed by the […]

It’s time to address the elephant in the board rooms of the nation’s foundations: the impact of the $650 billion in philanthropic endowments. So says Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, who announced that the nation’s second-largest private foundation will put forward a specific impact investing policy for its $12 billion endowment “in the […]

What, where, when and how impact capital flowed this week…See more impact deals in ImpactAlpha’s DealFlow section. Send your dealflow news to info@impactalpha.com. Latino small businesses get a boost. The Surdna Foundation is boosting its support for Latino small businesses with a $2 million program-related investment, along with grant support. The investment is intended to accelerate lending among Latino-led […]

Growing retail demand for sustainable seafood from North America and Europe is creating economic opportunities for environment-friendly businesses closer to the fish and the men and women who catch and process them.   In the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, among the world’s richest fishing grounds, a new school of seafood companies is working to keep […]

As preservation and restoration of the oceans rises on the global agenda (see UN Sustainable Development Goal No. 14: “Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources”) it may be instructive to look back on the decade-long story of a private equity fund that intended to do just that. The Sea Change Investment Fund, vintage […]

It’s not surprising that impact investors believe environmental sustainability creates long-term value. That a traditional private equity investor is betting on sustainability — that’s a signal of an important market shift. That shift has occurred in aquaculture, says Francisco Saraiva Gomes, CEO of Pontos Aqua Holdings, an investment company he formed last year with Tinicum […]

To truly change the world, entrepreneurship has to include everyone. Technology pioneer Freada Kapor Klein recently told me: “We can’t close gaps to access and opportunity without having our entrepreneurs come from the communities we are trying to serve. Lived experience is essential in creating successful businesses.” Unfortunately, today, we’re leaving nearly half the entrepreneurs […]

The world is awash in money for sustainable development. Not the relatively few billions in public-sector foreign aid or philanthropy — the $218 trillion private capital market.  A new matchmaking platform aims to help leverage the former to get at the latter by facilitating so-called “blended” capital structures to increase the flow of development capital to developing countries. The […]

Bamboo Finance is moving to fill the financing gap for small- and mid-sized African agribusinesses. The Luxembourg-based private equity firm has raised the first $10 million for its planned $50 million “Nisaba” impact fund from Louis Dreyfus Holding, a major global agriculture conglomerates. Bamboo expects to achieve a first close and begin making investments by mid-2016. Bamboo […]

Are sustainability factors material to the company? There’s now a credential for the financial professionals charged with analyzing such issues. The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), a non-profit organization, has established a credential to help professionals identify the issues that can impact the financial performance of a company. The  Fundamentals of Sustainability Accounting (FSA) Credential consists of a two-part test: a Level I exam, […]

As more foundations start to deploy impact investments to accomplish their philanthropic goals, some pioneers in the field of mission investing are sharing their hard-earned lessons to perhaps boost the confidence of recent adopters. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, for example, with a $180 million mandate for impact investments, has released an outside analysis,“Mission […]

A new index of public equities is designed to reward “climate leaders” and punish “climate laggards” while perhaps delivering outperformance for investors as well. Etho Capital‘s Climate Leadership Index (ECLI) is designed to meet the criteria of the fossil-fuel divestment movement by screening out oil, coal and natural gas companies. It also screens out companies with generally […]

Investors who backed a  pay-for-success program in London have been alerted that the “success” part has panned out. The “social impact bond,” or SIB, raised £900,000 ($1.4 million) to boost at-risk youth employment. It was backed by UK’s Department for Work and Pensions. Now that the program has met its outcomes targets required, the agency […]

At Sonen Capital, we believe that capital markets can and should help solve the world’s pressing environmental and social issues, while at the same time delivering market-based financial performance. For foundations in particular, impact-oriented investment portfolios have enormous potential to amplify philanthropic programming and grant making. Too frequently foundations invest at cross-purposes by investing their corpus […]

A basket of impact investment funds measured solely for their impressive social and environmental returns would justifiably prompt the question, “How did they perform financially?” So it is with two reports this year that analyzed data from investment funds and found that, at least in some categories, they matched or outperformed a comparable set of ‘normal’ […]

Equity gets the glory, but sometimes it’s debt that gets the job done. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation this week committed $15 million to Simpa Networks, SunFunder, and Off-Grid Electric, which each finance access to clean energy “beyond the grid” in east Africa, India and other emerging markets. The so-called program-related investments will be […]

The signal may be as important as the substance. New guidance from the Department of Labor gives a green light to pension fund managers to consider environmental and social benefits in their investment decisions. Proponents of the change have been looking for that signal to unlock billions, or even trillions of dollars for investment in […]

Where was the fish fillet on my dinner plate caught? Was it mishandled? Is this species endangered? Consumers increasingly want to know the story of their seafood. That has been a market barrier for small-scale fishermen and women, who make up 90 percent of the world’s fishing workforce. The data gaps begin as soon as a […]

Impact is in the eye of the beholder, or at least in the eye of the fund manager. A new study on the financial performance of private equity impact investments provides fresh data that suggests at least some segments are indeed delivering “market-rate” returns. Moreover, the report, “Great Expectations: Mission Preservation and Financial Performance in Impact Investments,” from the […]

Brazil’s cattle industry has been targeted as a major contributor to deforestation and climate change. A project to restore the Amazon rainforest through new cattle ranching techniques aims to provide a counter-example. The Althelia Climate Fund, based in Luxembourg, has committed €11.5 million to Novo Campo, a pilot cattle ranching project in the Brazilian state of Mato […]

We’re digging out after four busy days at last week’s SOCAP, the Social Capital Markets conference and found a few more highlight: Manufactured fertilizers, animal feedlots and industrial agriculture drive carbon. Industrial agriculture degrades the oceans through excessive runoff of topsoil from fields and the associated chemical pollution from petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides. Carbon-sequestration warriors like Estancia Grass […]

Apparel is a trillion-dollar industry with complex global linkages for supplies, production and distribution, employing tens of millions worldwide. It’s also a source of chemical pollution of water and land, human rights abuses and untraceable supplies. Case in point, the Rana Plaza disaster of 2013. Consumers are waking up. Consumers know that the products they consume or wear do […]

The Blue Angels “disrupted” the SOCAP, the Social Capital Markets conference, but not enough to chill the animated conversations and discussions. A few highlights: “Impact Inventing” is a thing. The term is what the Lemelson Foundation uses to describe using invention to solve the world’s toughest problems. But invention-based enterprises face unique challenges including lack of […]

Deep in thought around bringing money into markets that matter at this year’s SOCAP conference in Ft Mason, San Francisco, impact investors were joined by special guests, the Blue Angels. I caught up with these hotshots to hear their thoughts on emerging fields and get their perspective on the conference. IA – Thank you for agreeing […]

ImpactAlpha reporters are fanning out across SOCAP, the Social Capital Markets conference, to catch conversations on sustainability in the supply chain for apparel, healthy food financing, fintech, conservation finance, and yes, the state of impact investing. Here’s some of what they  have picked up: Mainstream investors are beginning to see impact investing as a diversification strategy. […]

Collaboration is in the air. Public, philanthropic, and private investors are coming together to finance new inventions, the early stages of a social enterprise, the new set of global development goals and much more. How best to blend capital to meet the needs of social startups and new markets is a hot topic at the annual Social Capital […]