Social impact investing, agriculture, and the financialisation of development: insights from sub-Saharan Africa

This paper explores how social impact investing (SII)—where financial investments are made with the intention to generate a beneficial and measurable social impact alongside a financial return—is influencing new forms of agricultural development, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. The rapid growth of SII is occurring in the context of broader shifts in development away from aid-based interventions towards private-sector led and growth-orientated models. We ask four questions: i) who are the key actors involved in SII in African agriculture (and what motivates their involvement); ii) how is the notion of social impact defined and operationalised; iii) through what practices and narratives is African agriculture specifically constructed as a site for investment; and iv) what are the political-economic implications of the resulting assemblage of actors, metrics and motivations (especially in terms of what and where is rendered investable)? We draw on a cultural political economy approach combining the core interests of political economy (investigating the structures, institutions and power relations of economic processes) with insights from post-structuralist social science into how such economic processes take on particular meanings through historically and geographically specific practices and discourses. We show that SII is driven by commercial interests, shifts in investment in relation to the growth of ethical capitalism, and shifts in philanthropic circles to viewing SII as a mechanism to access alternative sources of funding. SII is thus not simply a tool for creating new sources of funding for existing development activities. It is changing development policy and practice by bringing in new actors (most notably private equity funds and institutional investors); altering the nature and activities of existing actors (for example encouraging philanthropic organisations to blend their activities, rather than simply using investment returns to fund development work); and producing new and uneven geographies of agricultural development