I’ve been looking for options for ethical savings/investment aligned with EA ideas (particularly options that don’t just fund projects in your home country).
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JqCoJWH7JXnrWeGi4/what-do-you-do-with-your-savings made me aware of Mintos, a loan investment platform which funds loans around the world, including in developing countries. Unfortunately the platform is not available to UK investors. Does anyone use something similar which is available in the UK? Many of the peer-to-peer lending alternatives I’ve been searching through mostly just lend to European businesses.
Key features I’d be looking for:
Essential
Investment in loans to developing countries
Minimal active management, I don’t want to be making dozens of decisions on microloans of £50-100
Stable platform (risk to investments is acceptable and inevitable, the platform being unreliable or untrustworthy is not)
Desirable
Automatic portfolio management (with ability to choose broad parameters of investment)
You might want to reach out to the author of this post to see if they got anywhere with their research
I can only echo what I said on that post, Energise Africa lets you invest in bonds, it used to be just for solar panels but they’ve expanded recently to other things like electric forklifts
You can invest via your ISA too
The platform itself I think is stable and reliable, though the companies themselves do occasionally go under—I think rising interest rates over the past couple of years hit some of these companies hard. When I have time later I’ll go through my portfolio and share the performance of my investments