Shared Interest History
In 1994, the year of South Africa's first fully democratic elections, Shared Interest was established by the Fund for a Free South Africa (a not-for-profit organization established by black South Africans in exile in the U.S.) Turning from disinvestment to reinvestment, Shared Interest has helped lay the practical economic foundations for South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy, and its establishment as a successful African model and world leader for peaceful and democratic development. This model gives low-income South Africans of color the chance to create new businesses and jobs and to build the homes and communities they so desperately need. In fact, South Africa’s constitution considers housing, health care, food, water and social security to be basic human rights.
To date Shared Interest has assisted more than 1.8 million of the country’s most economically disenfranchised people – the ones who seldom make the news. As a part of its strategic plan, Shared Interest plans to benefit an additional million people by 2016.
In 1996, Shared Interest helped to launch the Thembani International Guarantee Fund, a Pretoria-based financial and technical assistance provider that has since served as its South African partner. Working closely with Thembani, Shared Interest pooled monies to establish a guarantee fund. Guarantees are used to encourage South African banks to lend to low-income communities they would have otherwise considered "unbankable". These are rural women who save and borrow together, skilled black builders forbidden under apartheid to own or operate businesses outside their own townships or homelands, families in traditional communities seeking to extract a livelihood from barren soil. The most difficult part is moving mainstream banks to lend to the communities and organizations they have never served and never known. This process has built relationships between the country's formal and informal economies and begun to link their financial institutions.
During the past fifteen years, Shared Interest has cemented partnerships with a variety of corporate entities, civic and faith-based organizations, ranging from individual and institutional investors such as JPMorgan Chase, Deutche Bank and the Progressive National Baptist Convention, a historically black denomination with more than 1,800 churches and 2.5 million members. This collaboration allows the Convention to build its own capital base by accepting charitable contributions, which it lends to Shared Interest in order to put its vision of economic justice and freedom to work in South Africa.
Partnerships also include collaborations with MicroPlace – an Ebay subsidiary that enables investors to place funds with Shared Interests online – and the overseas Private Investment Corporation, which has committed a $3 million facility to help protect investors’ principal.
Shared Interest is continuing to raise funds in the U.S. to guarantee loans issued by South African banks to low-income South Africans.
Annual Reports