Briefly describe your work with agtech and explain what motivates you to invest your time in this work.

Our work in Agtech brings innovations to smallholder farmers, with an aim to increase their income, reduce drudgery and enable them to manage various risks. Through our full-stack lab-to-market architecture, we provide startups access to new markets while working on the demand side, helping small farmers adopt the solutions and create a positive impact in their lives. This is supplemented with evidence-based, data-driven and community-endorsed policy advocacy which might lead to unlocking state subsidies and other public policy enablers. The idea is to align the incentives of Society, State and Markets.

Briefly explain any commitments to sustainability that you or your organization bring to your work on agtech innovation. Be as specific as possible regarding what kinds of social and environmental impacts you aim to produce, and the relevant strategies you are pursuing.

Small farmers in the global south are the biggest victims of climate change. Additionally, decades of intensive monocropping and indiscriminate use of chemicals have already degraded their soil and compromised the water tables. We are committed to providing climate-smart technologies and breakthrough innovations directly impacting the farmers. We are committed to curating innovations that help farmers adapt to climate-induced weather volatility.

Briefly describe the way(s) in which you assess/measure social and environmental impact in your work on agtech innovation.

• Increase in farm income
• Ability to manage risks (e.g. post-harvest losses containment)
• Reduction in drudgery
• Additional income sources (e.g. Dairy and Fisheries to supplement farm income)
• GHG emissions avoidance potential of innovation
• Additional cost saving /income enhancement from farm waste (waste to value and circular economy)

Our research and this workshop aim to investigate tensions between the demands/imperatives of the tech-finance industry and the demands/imperatives of social-environmental problem solving. Please comment on this problem frame in general, and in relation to specific examples from your own experience.

How do we converge the imperatives? By alignign the incentives. Therefore supporting new mission driven startups who are willing to work with small farmers instead of working with large corporations is our mandate

To investigate the tensions suggested above, we rely on the concept of “mission drift”. We understand mission drift as a tendency for social and environmental impact commitments of individuals and organizations to leak out over time due to pressures and opportunities to expand revenue, valuation and capital gains. Our project aims to investigate mission drift applied to entrepreneurial ventures as well as to organizations dedicated to supporting innovation. Please comment on this thesis in general, and in relation to specific things you have experienced where possible. To the extent you find this thesis useful, what strategies can you identify to defend against mission drift?

Mission drift happens when mainstream impact investors hijack the agenda and prioritise enterprise valuation growth over the social and environmental impact. This can only be addressed by creating new markets and a new pool of capital that is mission-aligned, i.e. “impact first”. We call it impact-first investing. My question to so-called impact investors is – “If you are not willing to put off financial return or accept unknown risk, then what are you delivering that the market cannot deliver?”

Please share something you would like to take away from the workshop.

Social Alpha has created a new category beyond the binaries of non-profit and for-profit. I would like to see whether the workshop participants see any value in our full-stack architecture of impact-first investing and circular philanthropy and are willing to provide academic legitimacy to our work 🙂

We are learning while doing and doing while learning, and this is a demand-driven market-based model with no theoretical framework. NGO put us in the category of VCs and VCs think of us as a charity.