FINCA International, a Washington, DC-based organization that aims to catalyze economic growth and alleviate poverty, has launched FINCA Ventures, an impact investing platform that provides patient capital and pre- and post-investment support to help early-stage social enterprises achieve growth and scale.
Through FINCA Ventures, FINCA International supports innovative solutions to poverty in energy, water/sanitation/hygiene (WASH), education, health, agriculture and financial technology (fintech) that align with FINCA’s charitable mission, thus fostering a market for extremely affordable, life-improving products and services for the bottom of the pyramid.
Over the past 18 months, FINCA Ventures has invested in six social enterprises that are serving emerging market customers, including:
– Amped Innovation: Designs solar home systems and DC-powered productive use appliances to help those living under $4 per day grow their wallets.
– BioLite: Designs and manufactures clean-burning, electricity-generating cookstoves and solar home systems for off-grid households.
– Eneza Education: Develops hardware-agnostic digital educational curriculums that work on basic feature phones, smartphones and tablets for K-12 students and beyond.
– Good Nature Agro: Partners with smallholder farmers to improve their productivity through soil-enriching legume farming and links them to a high-value legume seed market to grow farmer incomes.
– Ignitia: Sends hyper-local, highly accurate tropical weather forecasts to smallholder farmers via SMS to reduce risk and loss for better harvests.
– Sanivation: Provides waste-to-energy sanitation services to local governments and refugee camps, turning fecal sludge into environmentally-friendly fuel alternatives to charcoal and firewood.
Led by Ami Dalal, Vice President and Managing Director, FINCA Ventures seeks likeminded partners for co-investment opportunities.
FinSMEs
22/08/2018