Capitalplus Exchange Corporation

Capacity building: this program builds financial institutions' internal capability to expand services to underserved populations. Capplus uses a transparent and client-driven process, ensuring that clients' capacity building needs are met and the new practices, policies, and products are embedded within the organization. Typical areas of capacity building include: lending product and methodology management, risk management, human resource management, new product development and innovation, pioneering new partnerships for services' delivery, and improved operations and enhanced efficiencies, as well as strengthening the financial capabilities of their clients. Some client financial institutions are required to pay for a small portion of the cost. At this time, capacity building services are focused on helping financial institutions adjust to all the changes in their businesses as a result of covid 19, in addition to our ongoing efforts to expand small businesses' access to credit. During 2022, capplus provided services to twenty microfinance and small business banks, primarily in ghana.

Original social enterprise finance: education markets impact initiative (emii): starting in 2015, capplus began exploring an additional strategy to achieve our objective of increasing economic opportunity, equity, jobs and incomes: equipping financial institutions to provide tailored services to affordable small, privately-owned businesses that provide a social good (like health, education, water and sanitation etc), starting first with low-fee private schools. These schools are educating millions of low-income children in africa and southeast asia where government schools cannot keep up with demand and where schools government and private may not be providing a quality education. In response, capplus established the education markets impact initiative (emii) to build the capacity of financial institutions to provide financial services to the private schools in a way that also drives improvements in education outcomes and catalyzes a market transformation so private schools will no longer be financially excluded. Capplus has verified that thousands of schools serve low-income families, are severely underbanked and represent a significant market opportunity for banks, whilst meeting the needs of affordable school proprietors and the parents who send their children to these schools. In addition, capplus has met with scores of bankers, many of whom stated that they need new sources of patient and affordable capital to make loans to schools on terms the schools can afford. For this reason, capplus established a for-profit entity to receive funding including debt from impact investors that will be utilized to provide financing to financial institutions (directly or indirectly) for the purpose of providing credit to affordable private schools and related education markets. The for-profit entity's sole purpose is entirely to serve the mission and development impact objectives of capplus with debt simply being another tool to catalyze and accelerate impact to achieve capplus' mission: providing capital to expand credit to smes, who in turn create jobs and reduce poverty. In the case of schools, the link between education and increased incomes is well-established: globally, people's incomes increase by an average of 10% for each year of completed education, with higher rates of return for women and in low-income countries. Also, schools create jobs for teachers and workers, as well as many other jobs in the education value chain, e.g. In the construction industry as new school classrooms are being built. Education also helps prepare children to better jobs and opportunities in the workforce. The pandemic has created significant economic challenges for schools and financial institutions so our activities declined in this area.

Partnerships: capplus works closely with organizations that share its mission to serve small businesses, micro-enterprise, underserved communities and businesses that provide a social good in developing and transitional markets. Capplus' partners include foundations, research institutions, education initiatives, ngos, and investment funds among others. These partnerships allow capplus to explore new frontiers in sme, social finance and leverage joined capabilities to achieve more powerful impact where our missions intersect.

Due diligence and diagnostics: capplus conducts due diligence/diagnostics on prospective financial institutions clients to assess an institution's strengths and weaknesses and establish the priorities to be addressed in the technical assistance plan. They are a distinct part of the capacity building work undertaken by capplus. During 2022, about 20 diagnostics were undertaken.peer knowledge Exchange and thought leadership: peer Exchange promotes quick dissemination and adoption of innovations and good practices that support poverty reduction in developing economies through financial institutions. Knowledge is exchanged primarily through webinars, sessions at conferences or meetings, or through the publication of papers, articles, and research summaries ("thought leadership.") Performance and impact measurement: performance measurement tracks capplus' impact on its clients, such as client's lending to small businesses, women entrepreneurs, improvements in delinquency rates, and other indicators. Donors are raising their expectations for impact tracking and new standards are evolving in the industry; this activity will grow considerably in importance and scale. In 2022, capplus tracked the impact of its capacity building on the 20 financial institutions it advised, especially the impact on sme finance and nonperforming loans.