Q&A: Sweef Capital’s Jennifer Buckley

Q: What is the mission of Sweef Capital?

A: Sweef Capital is a truly women-led private equity manager in Southeast Asia, which is distinctive even across the broader Asia Pacific region. Our mission is to invest in high growth impact opportunities that deliver competitive risk-adjusted returns and improve outcomes for women and communities in ways that benefit our region. Our current team is all women and supported by a more diverse board of advisors. There are three areas we’re seeking to address: a dearth of impact private equity products in Asia that have a women’s lens and meet the needs of institutional investors; the need for better coordination of the impact and sustainability community across Asia Pacific; and a lack of awareness globally about Southeast Asia as an investment destination where diversity and gender can act as value-drivers in business.

Q: Why is it better to tackle these issues as an independent firm?

A: If we want to sell the potential of Asia Pacific, an independent firm based in the region provides a much better basis to tell that story globally. Our partners and investors also saw greater alignment with us as an independent. I originally joined SEAF to help it transition from being associated with governments and development finance institutions toward delivering on private sector investor needs; now as an independent firm we can be even more responsive. PBU, a Danish public pension fund, became our anchor investor when we launched our fund in 2020. It was the first time a pension fund of that size came into a gender-lens product globally, and they’ve supported the spinout with incredible conviction.

Q: Spinning out mid-fundraise sounds tricky. How did it go?

A: From an execution perspective, it was actually quite seamless to transfer the entity ownership from the parent to the local team. The Southeast Asia team was transferred over in the spinout. We had set out to raise USD 100m linked to regional Women’s Economic Empowerment under the fund branding SWEEF and now standing for Southeast Asia Women’s Economic Empowerment Fund. It made sense to echo that in the firm’s identity, Sweef Capital. Of course, there was a period of transition and the constraints of COVID-19. As much as that presented some practical challenges, it also created opportunities. We have been able to come back into the market with a stronger, more consolidated offering.

Q: How are you promoting the idea of gender-lens investing?

A: We’ve seen that Europe is leading the way in climate investing, but at the same time, the more progressive institutions are beginning to realise there is a social side to ESG [environmental, social, and governance] as well. You can’t think about the world’s climate challenges without taking into account the fact that women are being disproportionately affected by climate change. We feel that an investor today really needs to think about climate and gender as cross-cutting lenses. In Asia, we have climate and gender lens investors, but as far as bringing the two together and looking at their interlinkages, we’re one of the few.

Q: Where do you see women disproportionately affected by climate change?

A: A lot of our work is in sectors where women are prevalent in the workforce such as education, healthcare, and anything food-related from distribution to agricultural production. Investors don’t always consider how climate change impacts women working these fields yet the impact is well documented. When there are more natural disasters and infrastructure breaks down, women are more susceptible to violence. In sectors like education, women starting businesses also tend to be starting families and thinking about the needs of the next generation in terms of climate. How do we ensure that climate-related knowledge is coming through the education system?

Q: What are you seeing in the market in terms of potential investments?

A: We see the growth opportunity and the arbitrage opportunity in the idea of women as leaders, employees, and consumers with unmet wants and needs. We'ee observed a phenomenon where we  have wave of entrepreneurs coming through today who are more inclusive than previous generations in how they’re thinking about building their businesses and responsive to needs not being met in the market. The idea that you can build a strong company by being thoughtful about diversity and inclusion is almost second nature to them. It seems to be a generational shift – they wouldn’t think of building a company any other way.

Q: Why Southeast Asia?

A: In some ways, Southeast Asia is a leader in this area. For example, 80% of women in Vietnam are in the workforce, which is significantly higher than many developed economies. We’ve also seen relatively more investment opportunities in terms of the number of women-led businesses that have revenue around USD 10-20m and require capital to grow. Alongside that, the macro growth behind these countries is quite strong, so it just creates a better environment for entrepreneurs building businesses and a better pipeline. Take Vietnam for example again: according to official statistics, there are about 75,000 small and micro businesses in the country, but some entrepreneurs servicing this sector estimate this figure to be as high as 4-5m.

Q: What challenges do women face in your target markets?

A: While we have high percentages of women working and participating in the economy in some of these countries, culture – including social norms and intergenerational issues – is still a big barrier. One of the key questions is who should be responsible for taking care of the household, whether its children’s or parents’ needs. The expectation is still that the mother has that responsibility, which makes it quite challenging for women trying to pursue jobs. That’s why some of our work is around changing perceptions and awareness about things like flexible working and parental leave. This is also a significant growth opportunity as we see demand for services on an upward trajectory.

Q: How do you measure impact?

A: We score companies with a methodology we developed called Gender ROI, which in this case stands for resilience, opportunity, and inclusion. It looks at 24 dimensions of business across leadership, workforce, value chains, and society. We also collect data around SDG [the UN’s sustainable development goals] metrics. The important thing is to be collaborative with entrepreneurs. We see much opportunity in the region to strengthen small and growing businesses’ accounting and management information systems to reduce the burden of capturing data and ensure the data they capture of different facets of their business is useful and performance oriented. We don’t want to dictate to them – we seek to be their long-term trusted partners building their business alongside them.

Q: How do you balance impact and returns?

A: We see impact and returns going hand-in-hand with impact also providing an insight into a business’ opportunities and potential future performance. We’re probably screening for impact first in the sense that we invest in businesses where impact is integral to the business model and we want to know that there’s an alignment of values. But at the same time, we are looking at businesses from a commercial perspective. It’s important that we deliver market or near-market private equity returns for our investors. With PBU for example, we’re ultimately talking about the retirement savings of early childhood teachers and youth workers. We must deliver those returns for them.

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• GPs
• Fundraising
• Venture
• Singapore
• SEAF
• ESG
• Impact investment
• diversity & inclusion (D&I)