Initiatives

GBF pursues field-building initiatives such as financial models, tools, and partnership arrangements, that are suitable for broader application throughout the impact investment sector. GBF’s range of sectors and geographies has allowed it to learn from new initiatives that raise the standards and efficiency in the industry.  The most successful programs are prioritized and further expanded to maximize social and economic impact.  Moving forward, GBF will continue to refine and improve these services, striving to make them replicable for the broader field based on clients’ needs and common problems noted in the industry. Below are a few initiatives that GBF has recently piloted:

Building Local Funding Platforms
In the long term, social investors will only be able to reach a fraction of high impact businesses needed to lift millions out of poverty.  It is very important that local funding platforms are developed to fill this need.  Effective local funds need to be developed to blend capital, support businesses, and reach thousands of micro producers in their countries. Learn more...

Embedding Managers
Qualified, skilled human capital is scarce in low and middle-income countries, and High Impact Businesses often cannot find, develop, or afford appropriate personnel. GBF’s response is to build strong management teams, often by embedding managers, and to establish reasonable governance by requiring formal boards, prior to investing. Learn more...

Investing in Supply Chains
To date, GBF has invested in several high impact businesses, particularly in the agribusiness and artisanal sectors, where development of a fair and efficient supply chain is critical to tying micro-producers at the base of the pyramid to large, value adding processing and marketing organizations. Learn more...

iPAL Expansion: Metrics and Surveys
The Grassroots Business Fund (GBF) developed its Impact Planning, Assessment and Learning (iPAL) Framework to equip its High Impact Businesses with the tools they need to collect and analyze financial, operational and social data. This data allows our clients to make critical business decisions that improve their operations and increase the social impact they have on their key stakeholders.  Learn more...

Technical Assistance Workshops
GBF developed a program of regionally-based workshops that allowed groups of portfolio companies to network with each other and receive group training in financial management. Prior to and following these workshops, GBF’s portfolio companies had the opportunity to work directly with expert consultants to analyze their business needs and development. These workshops were sponsored by the Netherlands Development Finance Company (FMO) and the Development Bank of Austria (OeEB). As a result, the workshops have generated tools, best practices and lessons learned for portfolio companies that will be tailored – through subsequent technical assistance projects – to individual GBF portfolio companies..  Learn more...

Knowledge Management:
GBF has gathered valuable knowledge as a result of its activities over the past several years that continue to drive better decisionmaking, more robust problem-solving and improved strategic planning. GBF has implemented an internal Knowledge Management (KM) website to better capture the information generated from the experiences accumulated from our investments. The aim of this initiative is to improve our efficiency, deal sourcing and continue to build our effectiveness in building High Impact Businesses.

With the help of the internal KM site, GBF has already developed several “Lessons Learned” documents. Over time, GBF would like to broaden and expand its work to include outside partners in order to learn from their experiences and also share GBF’s lessons learned to date.