About the speaker:
With more than 20 years of business and investment experience, Brenda Pennell deploys capital to help agricultural SMEs in Sub-Saharan Africa achieve their ambitions. Her impact investment journey began in a U.K. investment bank in the early 2000s. While there, she wondered whether there was a better way to use money than through buying and selling esoteric equity derivative products. There was.
Pennell left banking to explore sustainable agriculture. She established a diversified organic food and farming business. After eight years of learning the ropes of running an SME, she realized that impact is best done at scale. So she “scaled up” by entering the impact investment world, where she has been introduced to some of the most amazing people and places on the planet.
She joined Annona Deep Tier Impact Finance, based in the Netherlands, in March 2022. Pennell holds a doctorate in applied mathematics from the University of Oxford and a master’s degree in development finance from SOAS University of London.