"Impact Investing: Financial Inclusion and Creating Value at the Base of the Pyramid" -- seeks to explore how investment in social enterprise can catalyze breakthrough innovation to serve the poor. Specifically, the course will help students understand why early stage equity investing is used as a framework for promoting sustainable innovation and how impact investing builds off of and differs from traditional venture capital/ private equity. The course delves deeply into specific impact investment topics – like diligence, structuring deals/term sheets, balancing needs of entrepreneurs and investors, governance, performance management, exits and how to establish an asset class of this nascent industry. The course is based on actual experience of the fund managers’ work in investing and showcases companies trying to overcome existing bottlenecks to broader scale financial inclusion in the following target sectors: technology & information services, distribution channels, and new products and services. This course has skill-building components and is grounded in case studies on social enterprises to give students a concrete sense of where the industry frontier is and how to push it forward. At the same time, the course will offer a chance to discuss important issues confronting the field.
Prerequisites include: either Corporate Finance (SA.380.760) or Leeds Private Equity in Emerging Markets OR enrollment in the Corporate Valuation: A Primer to Wall Street Valuation Methodologies course offered by SAIS Career Services.