What We Do
We use Business Rigor
Our mission is to grow viable, sustainable and inclusive businesses that generate earnings or cost savings for people in Africa, Asia and Latin America GBF is committed to providing equal opportunities to High Impact Entrepreneurs irrespective of their gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation to ensure they have access to appropriately structured capital and business advisory. We support businesses that do not discriminate and that are aligned with diversity principles. We work to ensure the lack of bias in GBF´s pre-investment and investment process, particularly in the selection, assessment and structuring of investments. 2008: GBF split from IFC and became an independent non-profit which continued investing in – and providing advisory services to – high-impact businesses in Latin America, Asia and Africa. GBF also wins the G20 SME Challenge. A donor-funded non-profit organization: The Grassroots Business Partners is GBF’s non-profit arm. It provides fund management services for GBI-I, provides business advisory services to the fund’s investees, and works to build the field of impact investing by providing insights on lesson learned impact measurement methodologies, and it’s model. The fund and non-profit combine to deliver a blend of capital and support suitable for long-term investment in businesses that provide opportunities to under-served communities. GBF invests in High-Impact Businesses, which we define as those generating sustainable economic benefits for large numbers of people from vulnerable communities. They tend to have complicated business models and supply chains, but are generally underdeveloped in management, operations and planning. Our model if hybrid investing helps us address the issues facing these businesses, by providing loing term flexible capital for investment and supprting skill building to improve business growth and increase lasting social impact. Already, there are signs that our model of risk sharing capital, BAS and high-touch engagement help our clients improve their operations, build stronger businesses and create sustained social impact, As of December 31, 2017: Learn more in our 2017 Annual Report All of our investees receive customized BAS support, mostly concentrating on strengthening financial management, operations, and strategy. GBF provides BAS during the early stages of our engagement with investees. We support catalytic BAS projects that help our clients grow to scale, become commercially sustainable, and create social impact. GBF designs, executes, and monitors BAS in conjunction with our investment work. Our regional offices lead the efforts to manage and deliver BAS both directly and through third-party consultants. We have a strong, growing network of senior experts and advisers in each of our regions who work closely with our investees to build internal capacity and drive high-level change programs. These advisers include agribusiness supply chain experts, financial managers, entrepreneurs, investors, and other business experts. In addition to our advisers, each region has at least one full time portfolio-level consultant working closely with investees on narrower issues such as cash flow management, environmental certification and risk mitigation. Learn more about BAS projects in our BAS factsheet BAS has helped ensure achievement of client growth potential by focusing on business fundamentals, anticipating and mitigating key risks, and taking advantage of key opportunities. In addition to showing healthy financial performance, investees have also, on average, improved along key business capability dimensions that aid investment success. As of June 2018: GBF has a diverse portfolio comprised of a variety of beneficiaries and businesses spread throughout developing countries. This provides challenges in assessing our impact. GBF’s impact measurement methodology is pragmatic and attempts to assess our achievements, learn from our experiences and improve where needed. GBF’s approach is to collect self-reported metrics, confirm impact through surveys, and generate economic value calculations based on the information provided, in order to calculate the long term potential impact of GBF’s investees on vulnerable communities. To remain conservative, GBF does not quantify secondary or indirect benefits but rather focuses on measurable outcomes to determine impact. For more, see Our Approach to Measurement.
Our History
Hybrid Model
Portfolio
GBF focuses on for-profit companies that have the potential to achieve significant social impact
Business Advisory Services (BAS)
GBF is funded by an active and dedicated group of investors and donors, who have helped shape GBF’s approach. The list below includes major donors and investors since 2008.
Donors to the Non-Profit:
Investors in the Fund:
