Who We Are
Global Partnerships is an impact-first investor dedicated to expanding opportunity for people living in poverty. For 25 years GP has invested in sustainable solutions that help impoverished people increase their incomes and improve their lives, with core investments in livelihoods, education, health, energy, housing, and sanitation. Since inception GP has deployed $384.7 million in impact investments to 137 partners, bringing meaningful impact to over 15.8 million lives in 22 countries.
What is Impact-First Investing?
Impact-first investing means investing in a way that seeks the highest possible social impact, while seeking to preserve capital with a modest financial return for investors.
Impact-first investing is distinctly different from return-first investing, which seeks the highest possible financial return (often without consideration of social or environmental consequences), and from philanthropy, which seeks the highest social impact without any preservation of capital.
We believe that impact-first investing has an essential role to play in advancing sustainable solutions to poverty for millions of people worldwide.
What Does Impact Mean to Global Partnerships?
All of our impact-first investing is aimed at empowering poor and marginalized people to earn a living, provide the basic necessities of life for their families, and improve their lives. We seek social impact on four dimensions:
Broadening Opportunity – We have a holistic understanding of poverty, so we invest across all facets of poverty: livelihoods, education, energy, health, housing, sanitation, and water.
Deepening Inclusion – We invest at the edge of the market, emphasizing approaches that include people marginalized by depth of poverty, gender, and/or geography, including women and the rural poor.
Serving Millions – We believe that every person matters, and want to expand opportunity for as many people as possible. We therefore focus on sustainable approaches that can, over time, scale to serve millions of people living in poverty.
Improving Lives – We only invest where evidence convinces us that people living in poverty value the opportunity being delivered and are empowered by it – economically or otherwise – to improve their lives.
What We Do
We create and manage impact-first investment funds. We use capital from these funds to make loans and early stage investments to social enterprises that serve people living in poverty in developing countries throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa.
