Microfinance company FINCA International has launched a new investing platform to help early-stage social enterprises.
FINCA Ventures is an impact investing platform which provides patient capital and pre and post-investment support to aid early-stage social businesses reach their goals. This new division will support solutions solving poverty issues in energy, water/sanitation/hygiene, education, health, agriculture and FinTech.
Through the new initiative, FINCA hopes to accelerate the growth of social enterprises developing goods that align with FINCA own charitable mission. Over the past year, the venture arm has already backed six companies.
Its investments include Amped Innovation which designs solar home systems to help those living under $4, and BioLite which builds clean-burning, electricity-generating cookstoves and solar homes for those living off the grid. Another one of the investments was into Good Nature Agro, a platform to help farmers improve productivity through soil-enriching legume farming.
Its other investments are Eneza Education, a digital educational curriculum, Ignitia, a hyper-local tropical weather forecast warning service?for farmers, and Sanivation, which provides local governments and refugee camps with waste-to-energy sanitation services to turn faecal sludge into environmentally-friendly fuel.
The investment strategy for the firm is to seek partners to co-invest into opportunities. Its decision for co-investing is to support companies with more capital and also increase partnerships forming.
FINCA International president and CEO Rupert Scofield said, ?For more than three decades, FINCA has given small loans to micro-entrepreneurs around the world. As a pioneer in microfinance, FINCA International created a sustainable and scalable social enterprise. Because of this, FINCA Ventures is uniquely positioned to help social enterprises grow faster and smarter and reach a bottom of the pyramid market more effectively and responsibly.p>
The company provides small loans to the poor in order to transform their community and improve their financial services. Through the Ventures unit, it hopes to create greater financial inclusion and build new financial products for the underbanked.
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