Investment Activity
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Managing Organization:
Small Enterprise Assistance Funds ("SEAF")
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Activity Description:
Small Enterprise Assistance Funds ("SEAF") is a global investment firm focused on providing growth capital and operational support to businesses in emerging markets and those underserved by traditional sources of capital. SEAF selectively makes structured debt and equity investments in locally owned enterprises with high growth potential.
Based in Washington D.C., SEAF invests in more than 20 countries around the world through an international network of 15 offices in Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Investors include a cross section of public and private institutions, including several of the international finance institutions, local pension funds, insurance companies, banks and family offices.
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Managing Organization:
Domini Social Investments
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Activity Description:
Domini is an investment firm specializing exclusively in socially responsible investing. They manage $1.8 billion for individual and institutional investors who wish to integrate social and environmental standards into their investment decisions.
Each of Domini’s stock funds is actively managed according to an innovative strategy that combines the strengths of Domini Social Investments and Wellington Management.
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Managing Organization:
ManoCap
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Activity Description:
ManoCap is a private equity fund manager that makes equity investments in post-conflict and other emerging African economies. ManoCap's aim is to create wealth and jobs for people in the countries in which we work, while delivering outstanding returns to our investors.
They take a proactive approach to generating investment opportunities. By conducting in-depth market research and developing deep local networks, they create visibility on opportunities in countries where significant skills and information gaps exist.
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Managing Organization:
Tuninvest Finance Group
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Activity Description:
AfricInvest focuses on investments in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with a turnover below € 15 million at investment stage, but not excluding companies of larger size with significant growth potential.
Africinvest's main targets are growth investments, buy-outs, privatization, seed and restructuring investments. The fund seeks to acquire significant minority stake in portfolio companies through equity and quasi-equity instruments which provide the appropriate degree of control or influence. AfricInvest also seeks to acquire majority positions or to have the ability to take controlling positions in portfolio companies, based on its ability to attract and retain strong and talented management teams.
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Managing Organization:
The Spark Group
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Activity Description:
The Spark Group is an idea incubator working at the grassroots level in India. Using insights from academic research, the Spark Group develops promising ideas into commercially viable business ventures that deliver valuable services to poor communities. The Spark Group is funded, in part, by the IFMR Trust and is supported by The Boston Pledge.
Spark's founding team has over 50 years of experience in world-class organizations such as McKinsey, Microsoft, Deloitte, IBM, Procter & Gamble and the World Bank.
Funded by the Network Enterprises Fund, Spark's advisors hold positions of eminence in organizations like Harvard University, MIT, The Boston Pledge and ICICI Bank.
The projects include Spark Accreditation - in which for a fee, any school can receive a letter-grade evaluation of its quality. Another project is Spark Guru - a teacher assessment service where trained teachers would be sent to identified schools and enhance the learning capabilities of children. Also in the pipeline are initiatives in the space of technology solutions for microfinance and education investment.
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Managing Organization:
Agora Partnerships
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Activity Description:
 Most aspiring entrepreneurs in poor countries are caught in a development blind spot. Too big for microfinance, too small for traditional lending, they represent perhaps the greatest under-utilized asset of poor countries. Agora Partnerships is a community of development and investment professionals, volunteer consultants and entrepreneurs committed to launching and growing successful, socially-responsible businesses in emerging markets. We leverage investment in areas where inefficient capital markets and other formidable barriers to entrepreneurship have prevented talent from achieving its full potential. |
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Managing Organization:
Medicine Shoppe India
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Activity Description:
 Medicine Shoppe India, the second largest pharmacy chain in India, is establishing health centers in rural India aimed at providing high quality yet affordable health services for poor and marginalized rural consumers.
Medicine Shoppe India has considerable success serving India’s urban populations – with a strong emphasis on safety and quality – and with the help of Acumen Fund’s expertise will be able to expand into rural market.
In addition, Medicine Shoppe India has innovated a new store format where health services would be offered at no cost, but medicine or other pharmacy products would be sold at affordable prices. To build awareness of their products and services at the village level, Medicine Shoppe India hopes to partner with one or more rural ICT network orchestrators.
The Challenge
In India, close to 12% of rural income is spent on healthcare and 66% still do not have access to critical medicine.Hospitalized Indians spend on average 58% of their total annual expenditures on healthcare, with over 40% borrowing heavily to cover expenses and over 25% falling below the poverty line because of hospital expenses. Almost 7 out of 10 medicines sold in rural India are either substandard or counterfeit.
The Impact
The company currently operates 103 stores across six states, mainly in urban areas as of May 2006. Over the course of the next five years, Medicine Shoppe will establish 130 health centers in rural areas.
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Managing Organization:
Banco Bradesco
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Activity Description:
Banco Postal, an off-shoot of Brazil's largest private sector bank, has made banking available to wide swaths of the Brazilian underclass which have traditionally been overlooked by financial institutions. Banco Postal is able to cut costs and increase accessibility by providing its banking services at 5460 post offices around the country. In 2002, before Banco Postal was launched, as many as 1750 Brazilian municipalities lacked banking services. Now, Banco Postal has brought banking to 1675 of these municipalities. According the New York Times, "Banco Postal has more than three million account holders, and a third of them have taken out loans. Though most of the clients of these banks are unskilled workers with little job stability, their default rate -- 9 percent at Banco Postal, for example -- is not much higher than the market average."
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Managing Organization:
BASIX
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Activity Description:
BASIX delivers comprehensive insurance and microcredit services to individuals, groups, and external institutions to improve rural livelihoods. BASIX partners with ICICI Prudential and AVIVA to offer life insurance, with Royal Sundaram General Insurance Company for livestock insurance and ICICI Lombard for rainfall insurance.
BASIX also teams up with NGOs, government, co-operative, and private-sector agencies that to provide seed money and sector-specific skills training to rural entrepreneurs.
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Managing Organization:
Anglo American
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Activity Description:
Zimele invests equity in small and medium enterprises in South Africa, promoting black economic empowerment, entrepreneurship, and the transfer of managerial and business skills. With Zimele, mining conglomerate Anglo American hopes to outsource the non-core activities of its business model by developing small and medium enterprises who can supply Anglo American with these services. In addition to
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Managing Organization:
Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF)
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Activity Description:
The Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) seeks to assist developing world communities and governments in the acquisition, financing and installation of decentralized household solar electric systems that convert sunlight directly into electricity. Using the latest photovoltaic (PV) technology, SELF helps rural families make the leap from the 19th to the 21st Century. The company works with rural solar electric associations, local PV-system suppliers, solar entrepreneurs, farmers cooperatives, donor agencies, corporations, non-governmental organizations, multilateral development banks, and governments.
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Managing Organization:
Conservation International
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Activity Description:
Makes primarily debt investments in small businesses which demonstrate impacts on biodiversity conservation in global priority areas. Starbucks uses it to allow small farmers access to credit.
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Managing Organization:
ShoreBank Corporation
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Activity Description:
ShoreBank Corporation launched ShoreCap International to invest in microfinance institutions in developing countries. The fund has both financial and social objectives. At launch, ShoreCap International was a USD 25 million company.
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Managing Organization:
The Shell Foundation, IDC
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Activity Description:
S3IDF brings to small scale, pro-poor infrastructure business opportunities, the innovative financial, institutional and technical engineering that is common in large infrastructure deals. To do this, S3IDF operates as a "social merchant bank" targeting very small enterprises. With help from S3IDF, the financing barriers that poor people in developing countries face for infrastructure investments
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Managing Organization:
The Shell Foundation, IDC
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Activity Description:
Launched in January 2003, the US$4 million Uganda Energy Fund - a partnership between Shell Foundation and Dfcu Leasing - provides both business development services and lease finance to SMEs in the pro-poor energy sector. Shell Uganda acts as a special adviser to Dfcu Leasing, providing no-cost support to market the Fund, train staff from Dfcu Leasing and share skills with eligible SMEs. Thus f
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