Download our 2025 Annual Report
Managing Director’s Letter
It feels as if every year we need to start this letter declaring, “impact-first capital is needed now more than ever.” Whether it was the Covid pandemic, racial justice reckonings, geopolitical turmoil, or 2025’s drastic cuts to international aid, impact-first capital remains indispensable: now more than ever.
Perhaps this is why, despite the world swirling and convulsing around us, we pride ourselves on remaining consistent and focused at Ceniarth. Our mission since our founding has not wavered: deploy investable capital to improve livelihoods in underserved and marginalized communities globally.
While others may pursue more grandiose, systems-change approaches to poverty, we derive our satisfaction from incremental, day to day improvements that we see delivered by long-standing microfinance institutions, community development finance institutions, agri-businesses, and other hard working social enterprises. We measure impact, not by whether we have “changed the world”, but by the amount of money that we help put back in the pockets of farmers, homeowners, and shopkeepers from Mumbai to Mississippi.
To be sure, the U.S. Administration’s gutting of USAID and GGRF funding, as well as operational uncertainty at institutions like the DFC, rocked our world in 2025. As you will read in the “Highlights & Challenges” section of this year’s report, most of our investees were bent, but not broken by these changes. We, and other dedicated co-funders, did as much as we could to step into this breach and to give our partners the financing flexibility needed to create business plan breathing room.
In total, we made $63M in new commitments in 2025 across 39 transactions. Our total impact-first portfolio stood at $320M at the end of 2025 or nearly 40% of our total asset base. Given the complexity and pace of changes to the funding landscape in 2025, our commitments represented an increase in deals by number over 2024, but a decline in dollars. We continue to grow our Ceniarth team in an effort to reasonably increase our pace of deployment.
One new aspect of this year’s report is the “Impact in Focus” section that for 2025 highlights our investment in Hatch Africa. Too often, we in this sector can get bogged down in the details of deal structures, blended capital stacks, and catalytic levers without always grounding ourselves in the reason why we do this work. We do it for impact. Impact comes first because without it, there is no point.