Partner Spotlight: Elevar Equity

Named for the Spanish word meaning to raise, elevate, or uplift, Elevar Equity fuels the economic resilience and vibrancy of underserved customers and Entrepreneurial Households in emerging markets. The elevar method of investing is built on four key pillars: targeting underserved customers and households, uncovering business models that deliver high-priority products and services affordably, backing seasoned entrepreneurs with the ambition and ability to address areas of access and inequity, and achieving transformative scale. With two decades of ground-up field insights and the scale journeys of 50 companies, Elevar has impacted over 55 million Entrepreneurial Households and catalyzed billions of dollars of capital across India and Latin America. Visa Foundation has supported Elevar’s mission with $5 million in investments.

Smallholder farmers in emerging markets are often excluded from markets, critical systems, technologies and resources—and these challenges are even more complex for women. As part of its efforts to uplift and include these producers, Elevar partnered with Samunnati, an India-based agri value chain player that enables growth and efficiency in the agricultural ecosystem. To date, Samunnati has reached over 6,500+ Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) and more than 3,500 Agri Enterprises (AEs) and helped catalyze higher economic activity for these FPOs and AEs through tailored working capital solutions, value chain finance and supporting catalytic infrastructure. In addition, Samunnati provides market linkage solutions to facilitate friction-free trade, enhancing market access for farmers and enterprises and most of all building credibility and trust within the agri-finance sector in India.

One example of Samunnati’s impact can be found in a small village in central India, where an all-women FPO, Damoh Mahila Kisan Producer Company Limited, was working to recruit more women farmer members and increase their collective opportunities amid the COVID-19 shutdowns. With Samunnati’s guidance, resources, market introductions and an initial capital investment of roughly $6,000, the group was able to increase its revenue exponentially from $7,000 to more than $285,000 — creating a positive impact for these women farmers, their families and their communities.

Thanks to the wheat procurement center that Samunnati has opened in our village, farmers no longer have to travel 15 kms to the nearest market to sell their produce. With Samunnati's support, we look forward to creating something big.

– Tulsa Prajapati, Chairperson, Damoh Mahila Kisan Producer Company