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Leena Dandekar
Founder, Raintree Family Office and Raintree Foundation |
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Leena Dandekar is the Founder of Raintree Family Office and Raintree Foundation. She and her family have dedicated their capital, networks, and skills to driving impact in climate action, circularity and sustainability.
Raintree Foundation is the outcome of the family’s deep-seated passion and commitment to climate action. Their aim is to build climate resilience in living landscapes. Leena oversees as a strategist, and drives the vision of “Dignity and Wellbeing for Planet and People.”
Raintree Family Office was established with the objective of investing the family-owned funds towards various impact and ESG asset classes. Leena has been one of the few leading the way in impact investing in India. Investments promoting innovation in climate solutions, circularity, and responsible consumption are focus areas.
Before starting the Raintree Family Office and Raintree Foundation, Leena served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Camlin Group, where she helmed various strategic and operational initiatives.
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1 Impact investing is becoming increasingly popular and as a prominent impact investor, can you help our readers understand how Raintree approaches impact investing?
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We are one of the first few family offices in India to have earmarked and deployed a significant portion of our own capital in climate impact- through alternative asset investments in India.
We invest directly in businesses with clear intentionality to create measurable climate impact. Since our portfolio is concentrated, we prefer growth stage businesses with proven unit economics, durable competitive advantages and a long runway of growth.
Our principle is to businesses with high ROIC (return on invested capital), they can self-compound in time. As a result, impact generated per unit capital employed tends to be high. High ROIC interventions also tend to crowd out incumbents which provide similar product/service (with much lesser climate impact) over time.
For example: we have recently invested in a green chemistry business which sources its final product from probiotics and replaces crude based chemicals in textile and paper industry. Its gross margins are materially higher than incumbents while delivering significantly more impact. It is highly probable that this company will keep gaining market share for years to come because of its ‘greener’ products with similar/better efficacy and similar/lower prices.
We seek out such ‘win-win-win’ situations in our investments where a solution is better for the environment, better for customers and at the same time delivers a good business outcome for shareholders and investors.
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2 Could you share some key projects or initiatives that Raintree has been involved in recently? How have these initiatives made a difference in the communities or causes they support?
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Aside from investments in climate impact enterprises, Raintree also has a philanthropic arm- Raintree Foundation.
The Foundation’s interventions have been in a place called Velhe, spread across 2100 hectares, 9 villages, 4131 people and 654 households, located in the Northern Western ghats. The Western Ghats are responsible for ecosystem services to peninsular India. The mountain range accounts for 30% of all plant, fish, bird and mammal species found in India and influences India’s weather patterns and monsoon. It is a UNESCO world heritage site and a Global Biodiversity hotspot. Our integrated approach encompasses three core dimensions: Climate, Community, and Biodiversity serving as the foundation for assessing and tackling regional challenges. These challenges span clean energy, climate and agriculture, sustainable livelihoods, water scarcity, landscape degradation, and human-wildlife conflict.
Our specific focus areas include Clean Energy, Livelihoods and Conservation. These are supported by a strong watershed ecology program. Furthermore, we prioritize community resilience through targeted interventions in the domains of Gender and Social Inclusion, Community Custodianship, and Grassroots Community Mental Health.
Our activities encompass a wide range of areas, including biodigesters, regenerative agriculture, individual, micro, and group enterprises involving women and persons with disabilities, strengthening existing water resources, managing groundwater, implementing surface water interventions, conserving sacred groves, establishing nurseries for endemic species, conducting plantations, providing capacity building for stakeholders, and managing forest fires.
Through our interventions we meet 15 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
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3 Many investors are interested in both financial returns and social impact. How does Raintree balance these dual goals when making investment decisions?
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Contrary to common belief that financial returns are competitive with environmental returns or even that they are orthogonal, our view is that they are complementary.
We actively seek opportunities which make absolute and long-term economic sense (return on capital appreciably greater than its economic cost) while delivering climate impact- because more often than not, they are better ways of doing things in society. As providers of impact capital, it is our duty to help these ‘superior’ interventions scale and crowd out incumbent solutions which are harmful for the planet.
Such interventions tend to deliver both high financial returns as well as high climate impact returns.
Such solutions are not very common, but if they scale, they can be very impactful. Solar energy is one common example. It has the lowest LCOE (levelized cost of electricity) while being environmentally friendly. Our quest is to find and help scale such ‘win-win-win’ solutions which can be massively impactful while generating attractive financial returns.
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4 Measuring and communicating impact is essential in the world of impact investing. How does Raintree assess and communicate the impact of its investments?
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Since we invest in climate impact businesses, there is a physical unit of impact generated. It is usually correlated with revenues. For example, we are investors in an energy efficiency business where each rupee of revenue earned corresponds to certain quantity of energy saved.
Therefore, it is easier in our case to measure impact than some social impact models where there may be a more subjective basis for impact and thus more complex to derive.
Our portfolio companies share these impact numbers with us regularly. Currently we use this data for our own internal assessment and analysis since there are no external stakeholders to report to. In future, we may publish some relevant data for the benefit of the impact investment community.
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5 Looking ahead, what are Raintree’s future plans and goals for driving positive change in the communities and causes it supports?
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On the investment side- since climate-impact is a global theme, we wish to invest in global solutions that can scale though ‘win-win-win’ outcomes and have actively begun looking across different regions in the world for such opportunities.
The Raintree Foundation’s focus is on the Western Ghats of India, spanning approximately 140,000 square kilometres occupy about 6% of India's total landmass. This region is of immense ecological significance due to its exceptionally high level of biological diversity and endemism. Hence, Raintree Foundation has a simple yet holistic view of environmental and social challenges by considering the broader ecosystem within these geographical regions. This approach is not just a strategy, it’s our foundation and our commitment to ensuring a healthy planet for future generations.
Our future plan includes addressing the interconnectedness of our world so we can create lasting change and promote Dignity and Well-Being for Planet and People.
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