How Collington Capital helped us navigate a path into the impact investment space. By Edward Thomas, Partnerships Manager at Oxfam GB.
Oxfam GB’s and Oxfam Intermón’s Enterprise Development Programmes (EDP) provides technical assistance and business growth grants and loans through local banks to small enterprises mostly owned and delivered by women.
The programme has a strong track record delivering growth across Oxfam operations in Africa, Latin America and Asia, and has provided low-cost debt to businesses by guaranteeing loans from local banks.
As part of Oxfam’s internal strategy review, we enlisted Collington Capital to help us understand how we might enter the impact investing space. The brief was to reduce dependence on grant funding for Oxfam’s EDP programme via an impact investing vehicle.
We worked with Collington Capital to evaluate the viability of different impact investment vehicles. The team at Collington Capital designed an impact and financial model before carrying out market testing with some of the world’s most prominent impact investors.
Our work with Collington Capital helped create an innovative ‘grant-linked gender bond’ and we also took forward its recommendation we partner with an investment manager to implement the vehicle and support the raising of capital.
Oxfam is a big organisation to get to know and one of the things that was most valuable for us was the team’s willingness to engage with what was effectively a meeting of two worlds: NGOs and the world of investment. Because it was new territory for us, being led through a process by Collington Capital was invaluable.
The team’s engagement with senior internal stakeholders helped build consensus and engagement, which is vital within a large and complex organisation like Oxfam. This meant we overcame much of the trepidation that can come with venturing into a new space such as impact investing. Through the process it became clear how the initiative would benefit Oxfam.
Once the Collington Capital project was completed, a decision was made to appoint a full-time impact investment director. This role includes overseeing the pilot vehicle designed by Collington Capital.
We have committed funding and are working towards the launch of this project later in 2023. Early metrics predict that 110,000 women will be positively impacted by the growth of the project, with a plan to inject blended funding of $50mUSD in women’s economic empowerment over 10 years.
For me, the success of the programme is evident in the way Collington Capital helped win the hearts and minds of decision makers which proved transformational for Oxfam. Collington Capital helped us move the narrative from ‘Should we being doing this?’ and ‘Why are we doing this?’ to ‘How can we do this?’ and ‘When can we do this?’
Oxfam is a big organisation and one of the things that was most valuable for us was the team’s willingness to engage with what was effectively a meeting of two worlds: NGOs and the world of investment.