Global Partnerships (GP)

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What: Global Partnerships (GP), an impact-first fund manager

Focus: Expanding opportunity for people living in poverty.

Details: Eight debt funds (four currently active) and one early-stage social venture fund, cumulatively impacting an estimated 25.5 million lives. 

Location: Latin America, the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa (with fund-specific capacity to expand into Asia)

What’s GP’s JEDI lens?

Given GP’s mission to expand opportunity for people living in poverty, the poverty profile of the constituents served by their social enterprise partners was their entry point into thinking about inclusion. To deepen their  approach, GP set out to understand the context-specific and multi-dimensional nature of poverty in the countries where their funds invest. Given correlations between poverty and other dimensions of exclusion, their approach has evolved to consider not only poverty, but also gender, geography, race, and ethnicity as intersectional drivers of exclusion. 

How was that strategy developed?

With poverty, gender, and geographic lenses already applied in their impact underwriting practices, in 2020 GP undertook in-depth country level research to explore the intersection of poverty, race, and ethnicity in each of the more than 20 countries where GP’s funds invest. Taking a country-by-country approach, GP investigated the nature and prevalence of key dimensions of racial and ethnic marginalisation and sought to understand their relationship with multidimensional poverty.GP aimed to anchor their research findings and actions in country-specific colonial histories and cultural contexts.

Following a period of desk research, GP’s regional teams began engaging in dialogue with current and prospective social enterprise partners. As with gender, they found that social enterprise approaches exist on a continuum:

• from mandated (those that explicitly aim to serve constituents marginalised by race or ethnicity), 
• to intentional (those that recognise race or ethnicity as key dimensions of marginalisation for their target segments), 
• to neutral (those that do not articulate race or ethnicity as part of their targeting strategy). 

Not only did these conversations enable GP to apply those learnings to their pipeline development and underwriting practices, but also reinforced the need to enter investment relationships with both awareness and humility, particularly as an international fund manager with capital sources highly concentrated in the global North. 

How is the JEDI approach being implemented now?

Taking these research insights and heightened team awareness, GP's impact underwriting is now informed by an even more nuanced and contextualised understanding of the multi-faceted drivers of exclusion in the countries where the GP affiliated funds invest. The team starts with inquiry, asking questions such as “what marginalised communities/groups does your enterprise aim to serve?” and “how do you take the needs, preferences, and behaviours of those marginalised communities/groups into account when designing your products and services?” With poverty outreach as an initial screening criterion, and then applying the deeper intersectional lens, the GP team asks social enterprise partners about their approach to serving those further marginalised by additional aspects of identity, using country-specific context to help guide the dialog.  GP marries this inquiry-based approach with disciplined measurement practices, understanding that both quantitative and qualitative data are needed to assess an enterprise’s capacity to deepen inclusion.  

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