Fighting Poverty, Remaining Rich
20 Aug, 2018
This article by Ceniarth Founder Diane Isenberg appears in Impact Alpha on August 20, 2018. Read the full text here.
“Those promising comfortable market-rate returns while solving global poverty are the equivalent of diet gurus promising that one can lose weight while eating limitless amounts of chocolate cake.”
In the year-and-a-half since my Ceniarth co-director Greg Neichin and I wrote about the tension between investing in difficult, underserved markets and the desire of many in the impact investing community not to sacrifice commercial returns, we have ventured further in pursuit of opportunities to support marginalized communities, both in developed and developing regions. We have only become more convinced that trade-offs between impact and return are real and unavoidable.
Those of us with the privilege and responsibility of stewarding great wealth must confront this reality. If we genuinely wish to deploy capital in ways that will support people and places that are being left behind by market forces, than we cannot delude ourselves into believing that we can have it all…