Tour the report: mercycorps.org/MCVimpact2020
RESILIENCE. The events of 2020 and the resulting changes to how we work, live and interact with each other were understandably accompanied by a great degree of anxiety and uncertainty. It was a profound year that made many of us redefine success and question our fundamental assumptions about how to operate in the world. It’s also led some to say that resilience is the new ROI.
But what are the ingredients of resilience? How can you tell if a company you’ve invested in, or might invest in, is resilient? Are we, as investors, resilient ourselves? This…
By: The Mercy Corps Ventures Team
We’re living in a unique moment in history when transformative financial technologies have the potential to create revolutionary new pathways for people to spend, save, send, and secure money. At Mercy Corps, we understand how quickly and powerfully digital technology can transform the lives of the most vulnerable populations, and we believe that we can make financial access universal in the 21st century. …
We believe entrepreneurs developing bold solutions to the world’s toughest challenges can accelerate the path to end poverty and protect the planet. And we designed Mercy Corps Ventures to meet the unique needs of early-stage entrepreneurs operating in frontier markets. We leverage the global resources and reach of a leading development agency to provide these high-impact enterprises with investment capital, value-added support and catalytic partnerships so they can scale solutions for underserved populations.
We have experience in fintech, crypto, agtech, climate adaptation, last-mile distribution, clean energy, impact evaluation, innovative finance and emerging market investing. …
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G R I T . Grit is what it takes to move from idea to market. To export coffee from a country in crisis when larger players could not. To make a basic phone as valuable as a smartphone. And to break through instead of breaking down in the face of company growing pains and existential risks. It’s a quality shared by the founders we invest in and one we look to embody ourselves. It’s also the theme of our 2019 Annual Report.
This year alone, the ventures we support reached…
Content for this blog is taken from the Scaling Pathways series, a knowledge partnership between USAID, the Skoll Foundation, Mercy Corps Ventures and the CASE at Duke University.
An increasing body of research, including that from McKinsey & Co. and Boston Consulting Group, shows that diversity in teams is correlated with increased innovation and increased financial returns. For many social impact organizations, creating equity and diversity internally is not only about the business case (e.g., better range of ideas, amplifying the stakeholder voice), but also about modeling and contributing to the “just world” these organizations are striving to create. …
By: Amanda West and Hetal Patel
This piece was originally written for The Purposeful Collaboration Issue of Business Fights Poverty Magazine (https://snipbfp.org/Issue2) to frame a conversation with Bayer, Nestle, AB Sugar and others at Business Fights Poverty Oxford 2019. We will follow up this post with outputs from the conversation.
Modern supply chains are a marvel. The system of organizations, people, activities, and resources involved in moving a product from source to consumer is complex. But, with constant and rapidly changing market, environmental conditions and customer preferences, incentives for key stakeholders in the chain are shifting. …
If I could go back to my time as an entrepreneur, I would do a lot of things differently to build my social venture better and faster. (It’s kind of ridiculous how many things, actually). A lot of these reflections have come up for me since I took a seat on the other side of the table and have spent the last three years as in investor in social enterprises. The two I’ll share today are: 1) take time to celebrate the wins, and 2) you’ll get further if you’re transparent about what you’re doing and learning.
Written by: Timothy Rann with support from Amanda West and Village Capital
Entrepreneurs and investors don’t always see eye to eye. They often assess businesses and prioritize actions differently. But, in the past year a social venture in the coffee sector was selected for investment both by an institutional investor and a cohort of peer entrepreneurs. This is the story of coffee and how Vega Coffee stood out as investment ready.
Why Invest in Coffee From a consumer’s perspective, coffee is better than ever. You can always access a rotating range of single-origin coffees. More often than not, that coffee…
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When Mercy Corps launched the Social Venture Fund (SVF), it was an experiment — an experiment to see whether an INGO could play a role in impact investing and use its global resources to help entrepreneurs scale their ventures smarter and faster. Now, three years later, it is no longer an experiment. It is part of how Mercy Corps does business.
Here are some of the high-level numbers…
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“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” — Mark Twain
While we ourselves still feel like a startup enterprise, we now reflect on the first two years of building Mercy Corps’ Social Venture Fund (SVF). Of course, had we waited for that perfect first investment — an enterprise that completely fit our investment criteria, was an exact match with our programming and a slam dunk in both impact and business potential — the Social Venture Fund would likely never exist. …
Recovering social entrepreneur excited to work on a fund that puts entrepreneurs first