NESsT announces today that Ioana Samoil has been named NESsT Country Director of Romania, highlighting the impact investor's deepening focus on accelerating Romanian social enterprises that create dignified jobs for individuals from excluded communities, including refugees, migrants, women, at-risk youth, the LGBTQIA+ community, and others facing systemic barriers to economic opportunity.
In May 2025, we were delighted to host an in-person meeting in Olsztyn, Poland, bringing together NESsT portfolio enterprises, partners from IKEA Social Entrepreneurship, and members of the NESsT regional and global teams.
When structured effectively, blended finance can connect entrepreneurs who need support with investors who care about impact. To make this model easier to understand, NESsT has created an infographic that clearly shows how blended finance works in practice and highlights its role in the Amazon impact ecosystem. This visual tool breaks down complex financial ideas into simple language, making it valuable for entrepreneurs, policymakers, partners, and anyone interested in advancing the Amazon bioeconomy through innovative financing.
NESsT announces today that it has joined the Sustainable Connections Institute (Conexsus), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and the Green Climate Fund (GCF) in AmazonBeEco, an unprecedented four-year initiative to support the sociobioeconomy in the Pan-Amazon region.
As we kick off celebrations for Pride Month 2025, we’re revisiting the recent efforts of the NESsT Violet Fund that have helped drive our work to bring vital financial and technical support to enterprises that are advancing equality for the LGTBQIA+ community in Central & Eastern Europe.
A thriving and inclusive future is built by diverse, inclusive teams. With the support of J.P. Morgan, NESsT launched Empowers, a program that prepares firms to effectively integrate youth and women into the workplace and to reap the full benefits of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in the workplace.
Claire Wilkinson has been newly appointed to the Board of NESsT UK. She’s walking the 184 miles of the Thames Path from the barrier east of Greenwich to the river’s source in Gloucestershire. While she walks, she’s going to consider social entrepreneurship and write a blog for us. She’s hoping to encourage donations to NESsT, to raise money for social enterprises generating dignified jobs for people most in need.
Latest post: 25 June 2019
Gender-lens investing initiatives around the world declare that mainstreaming gender in development finance and impact investing is about both men and women. Yet in most countries there are such egregious, multi-dimensional barriers to women entrepreneurs that these efforts are—and must be—primarily about advancing women’s access to capital.
As spring emerges in the southern hemisphere, the NESsT Fund is actively looking for additional companies that want to raise debt capital in the $50K - $500K range. The Call for Applications, active as of October 2019, aims to select 5-10 investment companies in the next two months to offer debt funds.
