Our Partner:
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger since 1945. FAO has 195 members, is headquartered in Rome and works in over 130 countries worldwide. FAO’s goal is to achieve food security for all and make sure that people have regular access to enough high-quality food to lead active, healthy lives. It main areas are: (1) Help eliminate hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition, (2) Make agriculture, forestry, and fisheries more productive and sustainable, (3) Reduce rural poverty by helping the rural poor gain access to the resources and services they need, including rural employment and social protection, (4) Enable inclusive and efficient agricultural and food systems and (5) Increase the resilience of livelihoods to threats and crises. Gender and Governance are fully integrated in the above strategic areas.
The Project:
The FAO Investment Centre (CFI) and the European Commission (EC) launched the AgrIntel initiative in 2018 with the goal to support the EC Directorate-General for International Partnerships (INTPA) in its investments into blended funds financing the agri-food sector in developing countries, improving targeting, efficiency and SDG alignment. These fully operational blended funds and facilities were to be evaluated with regard to their set-up, structure, governance, performance and benchmarked these against other comparable blended finance funds in the food-focussed investment fund space.
Our Tasks:
Broadpeak supported FAO by analysing and comparing the documentation of the funds and by benchmarking them against industry’s best practices (from comparable impact, private equity and debt funds). Our specific tasks included (a) meetings with the FAO team to agree on the methodology and approach for this benchmarking exercise and have a general discussion about funds’ categories, (b) review and analyse the legal documentation of the FAO investments, (c) elaboring a questionnaire for the fund managers, (d) interviewing the fund managers as well as industry peers and (e) literature review about other comparable funds.
Our Deliverables:
Broadpeak summarized our key findings in a presentation and in a briefing on this topic. elaborate and hold a presentation summarizing the key findings from the interviews and analysis and contribute to the drafting of a Brief on this topic, together with FAO staff members.
