Publications
Rural women often face gendered barriers that limit their ability to be productive, control assets and incomes, and benefit equitably from their hard work. In 2016, Root Capital began disbursing Gender Equity Grants to client agricultural businesses to implement strategies aimed at improving women’s overall quality of life and their representation in the business. In this summary, we present an assessment of these activities and the reported results.

Public-private partnerships bring multi-sector stakeholders together to solve complex problems at scale. They take many different forms, but tend to work best when addressing an area in which traditional investment is lacking and the risks are too high for individual actors to undertake alone.

The impacting investing sector has long lacked the right tools to ensure critical dollars are allocated in a way that generates both impact and revenue. In the Stanford Social Innovation Review, we introduce the “efficient impact frontier,” a powerful approach to building a portfolio with the greatest possible impact for the level of expected return.
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For nearly five decades – under both Republican and Democratic administrations – OPIC has demonstrated a market-based model for how to responsibly invest in businesses and jumpstart economic development that likely wouldn’t occur otherwise.

At Root Capital, we believe fiercely that women are critical to breaking the cycle of poverty, hunger, and environmental degradation in rural areas of the developing world. That's why we're thrilled to share our 2016 Women in Agriculture Annual Report, which details the progress we’ve made over the last year through the WAI and the strategies we’ve implemented to increase economic opportunities for women around the world.

As part of the aptly named Partners in Food Solutions (PFS), some of the world’s largest food and agricultural companies are harnessing 693 years of combined experience to strengthen small- and medium-sized enterprises throughout Africa.

Today, millions of the world’s most vulnerable people are fleeing from places where agriculture remains the backbone of rural economies, as the dire consequences of climate change—crop failure due to drought, for example—come into focus.

By issuing the first U.S. corporate sustainability bond, Starbucks can generate yield for financiers and farmers alike.

A lack of reliable information is among the most frustrating obstacles to unlocking the potential of agriculture. But as investment in AgTech heats up, what value does big data offer small-scale farmers at the end of dirt roads in the hardest-to-serve markets on earth?
