Ceniarth 2023 Annual Report
10 Jun, 2024
Download our 2023 Annual Report
Managing Director’s Letter
November 2023 marked our ten year anniversary at Ceniarth. While it has been a decade since Diane founded the office, our mission has remained remarkably consistent: deploying investable capital to improve livelihoods in underserved and marginalized communities globally.
This is not to say that we have not evolved, grown, and learned our lessons. In November, we published “10 Lessons for 10 Years: Inconvenient Truths From an Impact-First Investor”. The article, published in ImpactAlpha, highlighted our continued push for industry clarity, transparency, and collaboration. The key insights are summarized later in this report.
Pursuing our goal of a purely impact-first portfolio has had a myriad of challenges and surprisingly few peers, yet we achieved record investment levels in 2023: $90M in new impact-first commitments across 20 direct transactions and 19 new funds. In addition, we embarked on our most successful co-investment partnership to date with an aligned family office. After countless false starts over the years with asset owners expressing interest in impact-first, but failing to move toward action, we are beginning to see reasons for optimism.
In our key annual investment themes you will see this type of collaboration with co-investors highlighted as a win for year, as well as an increase in deal participations via our GP/fund managers. Clearly, partnerships are top of mind for us. We will be leading a new transaction sharing forum, the Catalytic Capital Dealmakers Roundtable, made up of leading, active practitioners across foundations, development institutions, and family offices. We also enter 2024 with renewed enthusiasm for engaging with traditional philanthropists interested in how to make use of impact-first investment tools alongside grants to further their missions.
Our optimism and enthusiasm is always tempered by the challenges of impact-first investing. Rising interest rates and inflationary pressures in the US and the UK make lending to small businesses and consumers in underserved communities as tricky as ever. Similarly, outside of our home markets, currency movements and geopolitical turmoil have been serious headwinds in many of the places where we work internationally.
As always, this year’s report will feature the many catalytic levers that we try to pull in pursuit of impact. From helping to structure new funds and scaling existing partners to continuing to deploy pilot debt to innovative social enterprises and pressing into fragile geographies, 2023 was a year full of impact-first activity.