Waterfield Advisors Will Soon Launch $15-million Development Impact Bond for Farming Sector

Waterfield Advisors, a Mumbai-based wealth advisory company & an arm of the Tata Trusts will launch country’s first domestic-focused Development Impact Bond (DIB) to help the farming community.

The issue would raise around $15 million and is expected to slowly increase the size. This will directly help as many as 6,500 small & marginal households and impact more than 32,500 people in Gujarat, Jharkhand and Odisha. 40% of households in Jharkhand are below the poverty line and the same in Odisha and Gujarat are 30% and 20% respectively.

Waterfield Advisors’ founder & CEO Soumya Rajan said, “The DIB will help in economically liberating, crisis-hit agriculture sector and bring them greater financial stability”.

This will be the 1st domestic-focused DIB & Tata Trusts’ Collectives for Integrated Livelihoods Initiatives (CINI) will be the implementation agency for the finance.  It is important to mention that the DIBs are popular financing instruments abroad for the social sector. In India, the DIBs have been started with foreign capital but none have been launched with a focus on domestic funds.

The issuance has come at a time when Indian Finance Minister in her maiden budget last month, announced a broad range of investments in farm infrastructure and promised to upgrade and regenerate traditional industries.

The Lakhpati Kisan Bond will give capital to a Tata Trusts initiative being executed on the ground by Collectives for Integrated Livelihoods Initiatives since 2015. CINI has created more than 25,000 Lakhpati families and nurtured around 250 rural tribal entrepreneurs.

Rajan said, “Given the acute agrarian crisis & farmer distress that we are increasingly observing, we felt that this will be the right theme to support our first DIB. Through this bond, the cultivators will get interventions in the areas of capacity building, land & water management, high value agriculture development, poly-house nurseries for yield enhancement and livelihood layering.”

Waterfield Advisors that works with family-owned businesses in financial planning, succession, family governance & philanthropy, manages assets worth $2.5 billion.