Exploring Impact-Return Tradeoffs in Underserved Communities in the Global South | April 26, 2018

Summary: Building on our prior explorations around the intersection of returns and impact, Aner Ben Ami of Candide and Greg Neichin of Ceniarth lead a conversation picking up on our earlier webinar on their approach to impact-led investments versus "responsible asset management" and looking at it in practice with Global Partnerships and One Acre Fund. Both operating at impressive scale, they have deployed hundreds of millions of dollars in loans. Global Partnerships is now in its 6th debt fund, and has distributed over $280m in loans to about 120 partners in 19 countries. One Acre Fund anticipates working with about 900,000 farmers this year, increasing yields by offering inputs on credit. While they are proving that their beneficiaries are indeed very credit-worthy, they are also adamant that their work should be de-coupled from the idea of a 'market rate' of return. In fact, for One Acre Fund and Global Partnerships, there is an unequivocal trade-off - the higher the return their investors seek, the more limited they are in achieving their impact objectives. In this webinar, Brian Heese of One Acre Fund and Rick Beckett of Global Partnerships share their strategies and discuss the specific opportunity (or cost) they see by offering a lower (or higher) return to their investors. [These "podcasts" are the direct audio recordings of TFIN Webinars. As the original format was a video webinar, please excuse any brief technical difficulties and note that presenters may refer to slides. To watch the TFIN webinar recordings with their corresponding slide decks, please visit http://transformfinance.org/investor-resources/.]