Impact Investing, Social Enterprise and Global Development

Abstract

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Duplicitous debtscapes: Unveiling social impact investment for microfinance

“…Kish and Fairbairn, 2018). This is surprising given that smallholder farmers are a key target group of microfinance across the global south (Green, 2020a(Green, , 2022aStolz and Lai, 2019;Watts and Scales, 2020). In fact, proponents of microfinance claim that only with access to finance can farmers develop their livelihoods and address food insecurity.…”

“…Social impact investment has opened up new territories of financial accumulation in agrarian spaces of the global south. A nexus of financial, philanthropic, and development institutions have together created “dense webs of connections between farmers in the global south to boardrooms in the global north” (Stolz and Lai, 2019: 294). These institutions have built professional networks, designed policy and guidelines, and developed technological infrastructure necessary to channel finance capital from impact investors to their target beneficiaries (Bernards, 2019; Bhagat and Roderick, 2020; Gabor and Brooks, 2017; Johnson, 2013).…”

“…Pitched as a response to the 2008 financial crisis by leading philanthropic and financial institutions, impact investors claim to combine social goods with return on investment (Langley, 2020; Rosenman, 2019). In the global south, social impact investors regularly support the microfinance sector in order to provide formal financial services, notably credit, to farm households (GIIN, 2020; Stolz and Lai, 2019; Watts and Scales, 2020). In fact, microfinance was one of the first sectors in the world to tout that financial investors can both earn a profit and promote social goods like poverty reduction (Mader, 2015; Roy, 2010; Schwittay, 2014).…”

“…However, this scholarship has yet to focus on the visual representations of rural poverty that inform the imaginaries of social impact investors, nor how these representations function as ideology. This is crucial, because such representations inform the “common sense” notion that impact investment for microfinance can solve intractable problems faced by farmers across the global south (Stolz and Lai, 2019; Watts and Scales, 2020). This common sense veils how microfinance debt actually allows “financial institutions to further capitalize on poverty” (Kar, 2018: 17).…”

Towards an economic geography of FinTech

“…Gabor and Brooks (2017) show that MFS are orchestrated by a combination of public, private, and philanthropic agencies in a 'fast evolving fintech-philanthropy-development (FPD) complex ' (2017: 424). This involves networks of policy-makers, international financial organizations, FinTech companies, and 'philanthropic investment firms' (see also Bateman et al, 2019;Mawdsley, 2018;Singh, 2019;Stoltz and Lai, 2020). Their ostensible mission is financial inclusion, and this might be viewed as part of a wider move towards 'post-aid' (Mawdsley, 2015) or post-micro-finance-led growth (Bernards, 2019a) in poorer countries.…”