We prioritise our investments to create better job opportunities and improve livelihoods for low-income people. We aim to supply goods and services that meet their needs.
When evaluating investments, we take into account the proportion of workers, suppliers and customers that we categorise as living on low incomes. Our investments reach large numbers of people living on low incomes by supplying them with basic goods and services, such as electricity and financial services, as well as improving livelihoods through direct employment or buying their products.
In India, Shubham Housing Development Finance Company Limited (Shubham) is a specialist mortgage lender that provides home loans to lower-income families who are typically ignored by mainstream financial institutions. Leveraging tech-enabled solutions, such as data collection, predictive analytics and machine learning, Shubham helps applicants without formal documentation to establish their income and access loans.
The company is delivering home ownership to thousands of low-income Indian families for the first time: 22 per cent of customers are new to credit and 50 per cent of customers are women homeowners or co-owners. We first invested in the company in 2021 and made a follow-on investment in 2024. The company expects the number of new loans to increase from 8,900 to 22,500 over four years.
Supporting farmers and rural communities
One of the largest groups we reach is farmers, most of whom are smallholders in rural areas. This year, we are reporting a decrease in the number of farmers our portfolio has reached. This is due to a combination of factors, including exits in the portfolio and a reduction in reported numbers from some businesses. The food and agriculture investments in our portfolio reached around 10.3 million farmers in 2024 – these include suppliers of crops, livestock and timber, and customers for inputs such as feedstock and seeds.
Examples of recent investments include a follow-on investment in AgDevCo (see case study), to help the company to reach four million farmers and support 60,000 jobs annually by 2030. We also invested in Johnvents (see case study) a cocoa processing business in Nigeria which is committed to educating farmers, improving supply practices, and offering fair prices that support smallholder farmers.
