Ceniarth 2022 Annual Report
Download our 2022 Annual Report
Managing Director’s Letter
There is much to recount about our 2022, but there is no other way to begin than by acknowledging the irreplaceable hole in the heart of Ceniarth that was left by the passing of David Freeman, Diane’s husband of more than thirty five years. David served as a Board Member of the Isenberg Family Charitable Foundation, but much more than that he was a grounding, ever-supportive force for those of us who knew and loved him. While we have grieved and remembered him this year, we know that he would want us to enthusiastically forge ahead in our good work.
Forge ahead we have in 2022. The headline of the year was a record amount, nearly $70M, of new capital commitments across 41 transactions. After two full years of Covid-induced struggles that slowed our transaction activity and forced us to focus on restructurings and portfolio stabilization, we were finally able to confidently accelerate new commitments. As you will read in the pages ahead, we accomplished this goal by both growing our own team capacity and also leaning on our trusted partners.
While Ceniarth may still be most associated with our earliest investments and strong opinions on the agriculture and energy access markets in Sub Saharan Africa, our portfolio is growing more global and diverse every year. In 2022, we made a number of new investments focused on impact in the United Kingdom, continued our activity around racial justice initiatives in the United States, and deployed capital in a wide range of sectors including housing, healthcare, financial services, and renewable energy.
Finally, while much of the sector continues to embrace the hype of “mainstreaming” impact, we continue to quizzically scratch our head wondering when, if ever, some portion of those declared trillions of impact dollars will ever reach communities in real need. That said, we were heartened this year by the Catalytic Capital Consortium (C3) shining a brighter light on the true impact-first work being done by many. Anchored by the MacArthur Foundation, Omidyar Network, and the Rockefeller Foundation, the C3 initiative has devoted meaningful investment capital, as well as resources, to educating the sector on what it takes to truly seed, scale, and sustain high impact work. We hope to build on this activity in 2023 fostering increased collaboration amongst peers committed to moving the needle on impact-first capital.