NESsT’s Nicole Etchart, Co-CEO and Co-Founder and Sebastian Siuchta, Fund Director in Central Europe, spoke with Pioneer Post Editor Anna Patton at this year’s EVPA conference in Belgium. Read the full interview on Pioneers Post.
INTERVIEW: Founded in the 1990s to support emerging civil society in eastern Europe, NESsT remains focused on helping high-impact organisations to grow and avoid grant dependency. We find out how the investor is going one step further to track its own impact – and how a new fund hopes to challenge LGBTQIA+ discrimination.
Impact investor NESsT has a perhaps unusual geographical spread, covering countries in Latin America and in central and eastern Europe. The two regions experience “very similar realities”, though, says Nicole Etchart, who co-founded NESsT in 1997.
“Fragile democracies in eastern Europe were coming out of totalitarianism, and in Latin America were coming out of authoritarianism,” she says. In both places, nascent civil society organisations needed support to grow without relying on grants – a challenge that continues today.
NESsT now has offices in six countries – the US, Poland, Romania, Brazil, Peru and Chile. It operates two businesses: incubators that help early-stage enterprises get investment-ready; and, since 2018, impact funds that provide debt financing to small and growing businesses.
Since it was created, NESsT has invested over US$24m, trained and supported over 24,000 entrepreneurs, and incubated and financed 223 enterprises. Recent initiatives include a programme supporting refugee-employing enterprises in Poland and Romania; and a research project to understand how climate change is affecting local communities in the Amazon region.
We spoke to Etchart, who is also co-CEO of NESsT, and Sebastian Siuchta, who oversees NESsT's new Violet Fund in central and eastern Europe, on the sidelines of the recent EVPA conference in Brussels.