20 years elea: our journey to sustainable impact in fighting absolute poverty
Globalization
I belong to a generation that experienced, in its youth, how the world was newly coming together. As a teenager, I made connections between distant countries as a shortwave radio amateur. While studying economics at the University of St. Gallen, I was preoccupied with the question of how the benefits of globalization could be so unevenly distributed. I felt that economists ought to understand how poverty arises and what can be done about it. At the time, during the Cold War, this question was judged mainly through ideological blinders. Capitalists on one side, communists on the other: both camps had ideas, but neither had real knowledge about poverty. Poverty was seen as fate. Much has changed since then: A few years ago, the Nobel Prize was awarded for the first time to a team of economists conducting empirical poverty research (said team relocated to Zurich in July 2026 to establish a new center for development economics, education and public policy at UZH). Various global movements, such as microfinance, social entrepreneurship, and impact investing, have shown in practice how poverty can be fought. If poverty is not fate, it cannot be accepted that more than two billion people must live on a daily wage of less than USD 3.
Liberal ethics
Alongside my engagement with globalization and poverty, it was ethical convictions that allowed the idea for elea to mature. I have always been a committed liberal: people should use their freedoms to make the most of their opportunities and put their talents to work. Fortune favors the brave. Seeking salvation in the collective has, throughout human history, repeatedly caused untold suffering without achieving its stated goals. But freedom has a counterpart: responsibility. Anyone who has more freedom, more ability, higher ambitions, or more resources should hold themselves to a higher standard of responsibility. With my successful career in the Swiss financial sector, I was in the right place at the right time. I saw myself as a beneficiary of globalization. Because of my liberal, ethics-driven convictions, I believe that responsible action means doing something for those who, unlike most people in Switzerland, did not benefit from globalization.
The early years
In its early years, elea supported a range of different poverty-fighting initiatives, some of them in partnership with established development cooperation organizations. Over time, we sharpened our strategy, refined our focus, and built professional capabilities in assessing, deploying, and growing philanthropic capital. We developed and introduced an analytical method for measuring impact. Our point system became the internal currency, used to allocate capital, measure our success, and steer our engagement.
Superior entrepreneurial approach
Our experience with traditional development cooperation projects on one hand, and with stakes in young impact ventures on the other, soon pointed to the superiority of the entrepreneurial approach. Unlike the project logic of development cooperation organizations, which operate on a time horizon of months to a few years, impact entrepreneurs think and act in decades, if not generations. At the same time, impact investing established itself as a promising approach: a new category of investment aimed at creating intended, measurable social or environmental impact. We began to see elea as a philanthropic impact investor, that is, an organization that systematically invests in young impact ventures once they have successfully passed the start-up phase, with the expectation that they become profitable, meaning viable, over time. As a non-profit, tax-exempt foundation, elea does not operate for financial gain, and reinvests any proceeds from successful exits directly into new impact ventures.
Investment themes
Over the years, our experience led us to focus on four investment themes that contribute substantially to poverty reduction:
- Agricultural value chains: In countries with less than USD 3 in daily income, 60 to 70 percent of the population works in smallholder farming structures under precarious financial conditions. Investments in entrepreneurial ventures that raise smallholder productivity, strengthen their value chains, and open up access to markets are correspondingly effective.
- Last-mile retail and services: In poor countries, supplying low-income rural and urban areas is especially challenging. On top of their low incomes, people there are often exposed to a "poverty tax": because of fragmented, inefficient, and expensive distribution structures and limited access, they pay more for everyday goods and services than people with medium incomes. elea accordingly invests in ventures that build distribution structures reaching these people better and more affordably, supplying them with lower-cost, reliable goods and services.
- Employable skills: After the Global South made major progress in basic education to combat illiteracy in the decades following World War II, we set out to build on that progress together with innovative ventures, making young school leavers employable through targeted, market-oriented skills programs, so that they can earn an income and build families. This work takes place against the backdrop of dysfunctional labor markets in most countries of the Global South, which, despite existing demand for skilled workers, tend to show enormously high youth unemployment.
- Climate and livelihoods: This theme was added later, as growing worldwide awareness of the climate crisis made it important to identify investments that fight absolute poverty while also contributing to the fight against climate change, or helping affected communities cope better with its consequences.
Chair for Social Innovation
On the occasion of our tenth anniversary in 2016, we endowed a Chair for Social Innovation at IMD, the globally leading business school in Lausanne, to advance research in this field and to pass on our experience as one of the pioneers in impact investing. One outcome of this initiative was the book "The elea Way – A Learning Journey Toward Sustainable Impact" (Routledge, 2021), which I co-authored with Professor Vanina Farber, holder of the elea Chair at IMD, describing our concept and discussing insights and lessons from our experience to date.
Growth and scaling
As for many other organizations, the outbreak of the global Covid-19 pandemic was a defining experience for elea. Overnight, all our active impact ventures found themselves in crisis mode, often fighting for survival. With emergency financing, other immediate measures, and intensive hands-on support, we managed to save a large number of impact ventures that would otherwise have gone under, and put them on a sustainable, post-Covid footing. Despite the rapid growth of the impact sector, in which commercially oriented impact funds have by now mobilized well over a trillion dollars in capital, we found ourselves, as a philanthropic impact investor, largely on our own. There were few like-minded co-investors. Combined with the sobering realization that the pandemic, the inflation that followed, and armed conflicts had wiped out much of the progress previously made against absolute poverty, this insight led us to choose a forward strategy: making our proven concept even more effective through growth and scaling.
Once the pandemic had been overcome, we developed our Vision 2030 in 2022. The goal is to triple our impact over that period: from the roughly 30 million people with daily incomes below USD 3 whose lives we helped improve through our investments in 2022, to about 100 million seven years later. That corresponds to roughly 5 percent of the 2 billion people living in absolute poverty. To get there, rely on scaling levers such as specialization, greater proximity through local hubs (in South Africa and Mexico), the active use of new technological possibilities, and pooling our investment expertise in practice groups, so that we can manage this tripling of impact while doubling the size of our organization.
Alongside our work on realizing vision 2030 and in the interest of sustainable institutional strength we adjusted and rejuvenated our governance and leadership by adding two younger Board members and hiring a CFO externally. On September 11, elea announced that I will handover the chair while remaining engaged as a senior mentor. Andreas Kirchschläger, our CEO since inception, will become Executive Chairman. Adrian Ackeret (CIO) and Niloufar Aazam-Zanganeh (CFO) are appointed Co-CEOs - effective January 1, 2027.
Outlook
We are currently on a good path toward realizing our Vision 2030. 2025 was a very successful year. We made around 15 investments totaling roughly CHF 5 million and grew our philanthropic fundraising by a similar amount. Compared to 2022, we have already roughly doubled our organizational capabilities, for example in investment activity or in attracting philanthropic funders. We employ a team of close to 50 colleagues (43 FTE, most of them specialists in finance and business administration) and manage a portfolio of around 40 ventures.
While elea’s early years were marked by considerable uncertainty, and our approach was often met with incomprehension and skepticism, particularly within the Swiss foundation landscape, we have felt clear tailwind behind our approach for several years now. NZZ am Sonntag called elea a pioneer in impact investing a few years ago. Today, many foundations and experts see us as a role model with influence reaching well beyond Switzerland. In recent years, we have also attracted philanthropic investors from outside Switzerland, for example from Germany, the United States, and Southeast Asia. The fact that the Canton of Zurich recently recognized entrepreneurial funding models as a legitimate, support-worthy form of modern philanthropy further underscores our pioneering role in this field.
Altogether, over twenty years, our roughly CHF 40 million investments reached about 60 million people. We were able to achieve wide-ranging impact, whether through improved access to goods and services, income-generating training content, or the creation of new jobs and better wages. We raised a multiple of our initial foundation capital of CHF 20 million from external philanthropic investors and mobilized additional roughly CHF 250 million through our co-investors.
Our experience over the past twenty years reinforces our conviction that ethically reflected entrepreneurial solutions will continue to be among the most effective responses to pressing problems in the future.
The article was first published in German in “Sichtweisen Schweiz.”
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