Vanderes Foundation
Izak van der Sluijs was born in 1930 in the Netherlands. He was ten years old when the second world war broke out and spent half of his teenage years living in an occupied country. He grew up to become a successful entrepreneur, but experienced poverty first hand. His late wife Mies van der Sluijs, to whom he was married for 50 years before she passed away, used to tell her grandchildren: “You can lose everything in life, but no one can take your education away.” That is why Izak decided to create the Vanderes Foundation to help improve education and access to education, as he believed the future of our world is in the hands of our youth. In January 2018 Izak passed away at the respectable age of 87. After a life lived to the fullest, he will be remembered as a successful entrepreneur, a loyal and respected employer, an intelligent and stubborn friend and a loving (great-grand)father. The Vanderes Foundation will carry on his mission to break the chain of poverty by improving education and access to education.
Let’s look at a couple of facts about education:
- According to Unesco, about 263 million children and youth are out of school.
- In developing, low-income countries, every additional year of education can increase a person’s future income by an average of 10%.
- Each additional year of maternal education helps reduce the child mortality rate by 2%.
- Educated girls and women are less vulnerable to HIV infection, human trafficking and other forms of exploitation and more likely to marry later and have fewer children. An education can help decrease the spreading of infectious diseases.
- One of the biggest reasons children drop out of school, is lack of finance.
These numbers speak for themselves, there is a lot of work to be done. And we need a lot of money to solve the challenges we are facing. When Izak set up the Vanderes Foundation with his grandson, they realized that Izak’s donation would be a drop in the ocean, while they were looking to make a dent in the universe. Wasn’t there a way to increase the foundation’s impact even with its limited capital? They realized the foundation could make a much bigger impact if we wouldn’t donate our money to one-off projects, but would lend or invest our money to organizations working on improving (access to) education. This way the capital would flow back over time and could be re-used for lending to and investing in new people and organizations. So that is what we are doing now, you could call us philanthropic investors I guess.
We have supported three student loan providers in Southeast Asia during the first year of our existence. Zomia, our first partner operates mainly in Myanmar and Cambodia and is the most ‘social’ student loan provider of the three. They focus specifically on marginalized groups of students like orphans, migrants and refugees and have very student-friendly terms for their repayments. Our second partnership followed soon after, with Indonesia-based Dana Cita. The founders went through Y Combinator, world’s leading startup accelerator in San Francisco. They decided to not market themselves as a ‘social enterprise’, as it woud potentially scare away investors, but we feel their mission to provide student loans to those who would otherwise not be able to finish their degrees, is hugely beneficial for Indonesia.
Thirdly, we provided debt capital to InvestEd, a Philippines-based student loan provider. Driven by personal experiences, founders Carmina and Melissa, set out on a mission to reduce college drop-outs in the Philippines by half within 5 years.
For a new foundation, it’s great to see where we can make most impact. Will it be through lending our capital to the most marginalized groups of people under the most lender-friendly conditions? Or is it through a more commercial set-up, potentially allowing much more students to study? And what about investments versus loans? What impact do we make by investing in social entrepreneurs to build amazing social ventures versus lending money to them or to their students? What about the risks and returns involved? Obviously the more returns we make, the more impact we can create, as we will (and also have to due to our ANBI-status) donate all returns topping our base capital.
We are now in our second year of existence, and focused our portfolio on more student financing opportunities. Even though there are many relevant solutions out there to improve (access to) quality education, focusing on one topic seems to make it easier to become a thought-leader in the field and adding value to our portfolio companies by helping them exchange lessons-learned and best practices. It expect it will also help targeted fundraising, which we plan to start in 2019, as soon as we can share some first results of our social impact.
Our latest partnership was closed in August 2018 with DANAdidik. DANAdidik is the first student loan provider in Indonesia using income-sharing repayments to repay the loans. They focus on marginalized college students, who follow mostly vocational training in the health and tech sectors. This unique repayment system allows lending to unbanked students.
We expect to announce 2-4 more partnerships before the end of 2018, all with social enterprises focusing on student financing, either student loans or (future) income share agreements.
I’m the chair of the Vanderes Foundation. You can reach me at: mirte@vanderes.foundation