Friends,

LeapFrog was created by a team of CEOs, investors, and entrepreneurs to seize a historic opportunity. Thanks to the explosion of mobile telephony, microfinance, and retailing in emerging markets, 3 billion previously-excluded people are now on the grid. For the first time in history, the majority of humanity is reachable.

The dominant story that we are told about poverty is that these people live hand-to-mouth a storyline that leads us to treat people as passive beneficiaries rather than agents. In fact, 85% of low-income people are emerging consumers, willing and able to pay for essential products and services, if only offered, to help them to rise out of poverty and into the middle class.

The greatest untapped opportunity for businesses, and for society, is to serve this immense market. Our team pursues and fulfils this opportunity every day. We call it Profit-with-Purpose.

LeapFrog invests in financial services businesses, mostly companies that provide insurance, in Africa and Asia. We chose these products and markets because that is where the largest potential lies for both financial returns and social impact.

Millions of people lie awake at night fearing that they will lose everything in the event of a fire or flood or other adverse event. Millions more would like to start a business, or plant a new crop, or send their children to school rather than to work, but first need to know that their families will be covered if something goes wrong. Insurance can both protect people and enable them to make different daily choices. Hence the recent global study by Lloyds estimates the potential market for microinsurance to be 1.5 to 3 billion people. It is an achievement that 135 million low-income people have been reached to date, but that is less than 10% of the potential.

We are proud of the fast-growing, mission-driven and profitable companies in which we have invested, who are successfully tapping this market. We are constantly searching for more such companies, ready to deploy intelligent capital into them. We are proud of the strategic contributions we have made in helping stellar management teams achieve their ambitious visions. We are ready to bring our wide strategic and operational expertise to bear, to do more. We are, above all, proud of helping many more people to access quality, affordable, and relevant products that they use to change their lives. And we are always tracking and accelerating that impact.

LeapFrog is now one of the worlds largest impact investment funds. We hope that our ongoing successes will help open the gates of the capital markets ever wider. Only then will there be the entry of sufficient private resources and talent to drive financial services to a point where, on an unprecedented scale, we end cycles of poverty.

If we as a global community can do that, we will have fulfilled our distinctive epochal promise. We will be able to say not just that the poor are bankable but that the poor are investors. They can access capital and financial instruments, they can take risks and generate rewards; they can shape their destiny rather than it being shaped by powers beyond them. That was the promise of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, but now for the first time it could be realised not for the few and developed societies but the many and developing societies.

LeapFrog is an extraordinary group of people, motivated by this magnetic idea. It is at once humbling and exhilarating to lead a fund and community changing the way our businesses and societies invest.