Willy Foote, on the Future of Resilient Rural Communities
Hi, I’m Willy Foote, creator of: Root Capital, a global nonprofit that invests in the growth of agricultural enterprises so they can transform rural communities.
Home base: Cambridge, Massachusetts, for 20 years. My wife and I moved here for business school. She went to school; I started Root Capital instead. Now we have three kids. Growing up, my home base from age 13 was Miami. It was a city in a pivotal moment—the nexus of the international drug trade, plus the Mariel boatlift crisis had just happened that landed 100,000 Cuban refugees in town. I fell in love with everything Latin America during these years — its politics, economics, music, culture.
10 years ago, I said: With the right support and capital, small agricultural businesses — like farmer cooperatives — are bankable. We needed to demonstrate this so other lenders would see that capital plus capacity works, and crowd into the market. Today we’ve invested $1.4 billion in 700 businesses, improving incomes and opportunity for 6 million people, and we’ve trained another 1,400 enterprises. We help the businesses we invest in grow and eventually access additional capital from other sources — 42 percent of our clients graduate to commercial financing within 2.5 years of working with us.
Today, I say: Dramatic changes in natural and market forces are buffeting the world’s poor — mostly farmers in rural communities. We need to invest in climate-smart strategies, support women and next generation farmers, share best practices among rural producers, and as before, bring other lenders with us. Solving these crises, investing in farms and enterprises that are sustainable engines of impact, will take high-risk, blended capital — a lot of it.
Surprising facts: Close to one billion people still live in extreme poverty, on $1.90 a day or less. Many Americans I talk to are surprised to learn or be reminded of this. 80 percent of those people live in remote or rural areas and the vast majority are farmers. Their circumstances force desperate choices, including becoming climate refugees. We all stand to benefit from making transformational farming work at scale.
Top-of-mind trend: Disruptive tech that can help smallholder farmers adapt to a changing climate with extreme temps, unpredictable rainfall, and diseases linked to both. Think: blockchain technology, climate mapping data that can be localized, SMS- and mobile-enabled agronomic advice and weather forecasting data. But/and we need a combination of tech innovation and human capital: We have to continue to invest in extension agents, agronomists, agricultural entrepreneurs of the future.
A turning point: Mark Twain famously said, “the two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” My version of the latter happened in the mid-1990s. I had traded a job on Wall Street for an amazing journalism fellowship with the Institute of Current World Affairs that sent my wife and me to rural Mexico, bumping along dirt roads in a pick up truck for two years. We met and talked with hundreds of families who were living in rural poverty, with very limited access to basic services. I had a moment of existential clarity on the way home — that’s when I set up Root Capital.
Last thing I changed my mind about and why: At one moment, we over-diversified our lending — too many products, crops, value chains, places. We needed to change course around 2017 after seeing that we couldn’t do it all with excellence. Going through the pivot helped us build a lot of grit as a team and go deeper on key impact areas like climate resiliency.
Advice to 15-year-olds: Follow your passion and your inner voice. And discover the world. It’s also important, I believe, to spend time on big problems, root causes. Many problems worth working on take a lifetime, and you’ll need to work with a lot of other people to make progress.
On my bookshelf: 1) I recently finished Fruit of the Drunken Tree, a beautiful novel about Escobar-era Colombia. Root Capital works in former FARC-controlled territories — for instance, one coffee cooperative has about 800 members who are former guerillas. People need to have viable jobs so that peace is more lucrative than war. 2) For entrepreneurs and leaders, I recommend Roger Martin’s The Opposable Mind. It’s about how innovators need to be able to hold two contradictory thoughts in their head — and be comfortable over an extended period of time with lack of resolution. Groundbreaking innovations come as you work to resolve these models. The book speaks to how it makes your head, and sometimes your heart, hurt when you’re trying to solve gigantic problems in society, which takes time even though the threat or risk — e.g., the climate crisis — is immediate.
Next for the series, I’m tagging: Ashoka Fellows Julie Carney, who started Gardens for Health in Rwanda, and Sasha Chanoff, who started Refuge Point here in Boston. Social entrepreneurs are masterful at horizontal integration and getting out of traditional silos — Julie and Sasha are great examples of that.
You can follow Willy Foote and Root Capital on Twitter: @RootCapitalCEO @RootCapital.
You can follow Ashoka at @AshokaUS. This interview was condensed by Ashoka.
