We invest in businesses that use entrepreneurial approaches to alleviate poverty. These social enterprises are created with the primary aim of generating social benefits and invest their profits accordingly. We help combat poverty through investments in the health, food, housing, and distribution sectors in Southeast Asia.

Tandem is a not-for-profit fund. Returns from our investments go back into financing social enterprises.

We believe that charity plays an important role in aiding those in need. However, there are many problems whose scale is too large for pure charity to address. In solving the world’s most challenging problems relating to poverty, we aim to bring the self-sufficiency, economic discipline, and incentives of market forces to produce sustainable and scalable solutions to poverty. These are businesses with the potential to transform the way that markets work.

Social enterprise is a dignified way of treating people. Social enterprises involve the beneficiaries in creating solutions to their problems, provide individuals with economic choices, and enable people to move out of poverty through their own efforts rather than by accepting the aid of others.

For all their benefits, social enterprises find it difficult to obtain financing. On one hand, they generate returns that are too low for banks of traditional investors. On the other, they are often ineligible for foundation money as for-profit enterprises. Our role is to fill that gap.

Find out more about how social enterprise works >

Capital		We invest “patient capital” to build and scale up businesses that offer solutions to poverty. Social enterprises often have trouble gaining access to capital because they don’t generate returns at commercially attractive rates. We act as a patient investor, providing capital to social enterprises that wouldn’t otherwise be able to gain investment.
Talent		We nurture a generation of social entrepreneurs into social enterprise leaders who create lasting change by bringing in world-class expertise to mentor social entrepreneurs and help develop their enterprises.
Knowledge		We accumulate knowledge on the best practices for creating social impact through business and propagate these through our investments.