Julia Santander, EcoEnterprises Fund: Flexible finance for climate resilience

All eyes this year are on climate action in Latin America. Behind the high-level COP climate negotiations slated to take place in November in Belem, Brazil, is a raft of creative restoration, mitigation and adaptation efforts ready to be catalyzed and scale in the region. 

Latin America has long been a testing ground for new climate finance opportunities. EcoEnterprises Fund in Colombia has been at it longer than most. The women-led livelihoods investor has for 25 years provided flexible financing to companies and organizations strengthening communities’ financial and climate resilience while taking care of the natural landscapes. 

“We started out working with startups. We were one of the first brave enough to give that a try,” recalls Julia Santander, a managing director with EcoEnterprises.

The firm, now investing from its fourth fund, has grown with the field: it’s maintaining long-standing investors while attracting new LPs from the region. It’s also now primarily focused on mid-sized, growth-stage businesses. 

“We see a tremendous pipeline of investment opportunities in Latin America, with companies that are ready to scale up, to professionalize, be more ambitious, both about their operational and commercial goals and becoming real leaders in a change process in the region,” Santander told ImpactAlpha on the sidelines of last year’s GIIN Investor Forum in Amsterdam. 

“And we see more and more engagement from local groups and family offices in Latin America interested in investing back into the region,” she continued. “There seems to be an impact investing boom in the region.”

Evolving impact lens

Sustainable landscape and biodiversity investing is crucial in the fight against climate change—particularly in Latin America, which hosts some of the most biodiverse, and climate vulnerable, territories on the planet. Most commercial and institutional investors still have little understanding of how to profitably and sustainably invest in natural ecosystems.

That’s quickly changing. EcoEnterprises’ strategy emphasizes both landscapes it wants to nurture and protect, and the livelihoods that depend on them. Its social mission resonated most with the firm’s earliest investors. “That has taken a complete turn over the past 10 years, with climate now dominating the conversation,” Santander said. “But for us, it’s also about the underlying social equity. We need a just transition.” 

EcoEnterprises is therefore redoubling its efforts to help investors understand important social considerations to climate investing in the region. Its especially leaning into the gender impact aspects of its work. 

“The women in the communities where [our] companies operate are the social glue. A lot of times, they’re the ones that bring in a good portion of the household income, or they take an important role in managing the family farms,” said Santander.

EcoEnterprises’ track record has enabled the firm to raise three funds. It’s in the market now with its fourth fund—its largest, with a target of $150 million. It is nearing a first close, having secured backing from the Inter-American Development Bank’s IDB Invest, Dutch impact fund of funds manager Wire Group, gender and climate-lens investor Heading for Change and others. 

Catalytic capital continues to be crucial to the firm because of the evolving and deepening impact objectives of its strategy. But that too is changing. 

“Our early investors were definitely purely impact driven,” recalled Santander. “As the whole sector has developed, we see more of a differentiation in our LP group. We have investors that are impact-first, but we also have investors that put an emphasis on the financial return.”  

Interest from a broader segment of investors demonstrates that “our impact strategy is more meaningful than ever,” she said, “with more attention being paid to biodiversity, climate and rural communities overall.”