With a focus on building resilience, Bamboo Capital Partners, the asset management arm of Palladium’s impact investing business, has released its 2020 Impact Report. The annual report quantifies the organisation’s continued global work of improving the lives of the world’s most marginalised communities while still delivering financial returns.

Despite the myriad difficulties brought on by 2020, Bamboo celebrated several victories over the course of the year, including the successful launch of its SDG500 initiative, which aims to scale collective impact through aggregation, and an increase in a more diversified investor base, including several African governments.

Bamboo Capital Partners Founder and managing partner, Jean-Philippe de Schrevel lauded the resilience of the team in their ability to continue creating impact despite the difficulties, “It is a testament to the resilience of our investees, our partners and our team that we have managed to weather the crisis and challenges that COVID-19 has brought and still, against this backdrop, we delivered on the mission in terms of on-the-ground impact.”

In 2020 alone, Bamboo’s investments supported an additional 3,600 jobs, 2,000 of which were for women, and displaced an additional 2.7 million metric tons of CO2 emissions – the equivalent consumption of 6.25 million barrels of oil or nearly 600,000 cars driven for a year. The end of 2020 brought Bamboo’s cumulative impact on individual lives since its founding in 2007 to over 193 million people.

Committing to Increased Impact

And in an exciting announcement, also confirmed its commitment to deploy USD 1 billion of impact investments over the next three years. “The years ahead are going to be crucial in terms of how we build more resilient communities and our plans to mobilise more than USD 1 billion over the next few years reflects the scale of the challenge and the opportunity,” added de Schrevel.

“And we believe the key to unlocking grassroots impact at scale is to focus on more modest ticket sizes and deploying catalytic capital in communities where the investments will have the most significant impact.”

For Palladium, the strategic partnership with Bamboo, announced in 2020, has been critical to increasing and amplifying positive impact on a global scale. Jose Maria Ortiz, Palladium Managing Partner noted its importance for both teams, “The Bamboo Palladium partnership gives us end-to-end expertise in impact fund management, from design to delivery.”

“This gives us a really differentiated approach and enables us to deliver across sectors and geographies, from concept to on the ground delivery - where impact matters most,” added Ortiz. Together, Bamboo and Palladium have mobilised more than USD 2 billion of impact investment funds in the past five years and currently manage more than USD 3 billion of private and public funds in 90 countries.

Looking towards the future, both organisations have reaffirmed their commitments to focussing on delivering against the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, paying special attention to SDG17, focussed on partnerships, which is proving to be key in truly creating positive impact around the world.

Learn more about Bamboo and Palladium’s strategic partnership, download the 2020 Impact Report, and contact info@thepalladiumgroup.com for more information.