Breaking barriers
WDB Investment Holdings (WDBIH) was established in 1996 with the purpose of ensuring the sustainability of the WDB Trust, to create a revenue stream to sustain the trust’s development programmes and to lessen its reliance on donors to fund its programmes.
Registered in 1996, the WDBIH became operational in 1997, and today has grown into a leading women-led and owned company with investments in financial services, health, industrial services, property, retail and media.
WDBIH shares WDB Trust’s vision to alleviate poverty for women throughout SA. What makes WDBIH unique is that while most investment companies aim to pay their investors dividends, a significant portion of WDBIH’s profits are channelled to the WDB Trust, which uses the money to provide microloans to marginalised rural women in order to alleviate the cycle of poverty in which many of them find themselves.
WDBIH’s net asset value has enabled it to distribute dividends to the value of R200m to the trust. To date, the trust has helped more than 180,000 women entrepreneurs.
From humble beginnings, WDBIH’s investment portfolio has grown to R3bn. According to CEO Faith Khanyile, WDBIH now only considers active investing and seeks board representation in all its key investments.
“This allows us to have a meaningful strategic influence, add value to our investments by assisting them in their growth plans and with their transformation strategies and also brings the women’s perspective to business by helping to drive the empowerment of women.”
Its success and standing in the investment community today are a far cry from its earlier days when one of the biggest challenges facing the company was a lack of operational and investment capital. “Without a balance sheet it was difficult to find ways to fund our operation and raise funds for investments,” says Khanyile, who cofounded WDBIH with Tania Slabbert. “Nobody took us seriously. More often than not we were an afterthought with little or no influence.”
In the early days, she recalls, they had to be creative about how they funded investments. That all changed with a BEE stake in petroleum company BP in the early 2000s, which gave the fledgling investment entity much-needed access to capital and cashflow. “BP was the first investment where we were able to negotiate a management fee as a result of a board position and a position on the transformation committee. This provided us with much-needed cashflow.”
Negotiating a seat on the board in order to add value to the investment became a key strategy.
“We were usually given very little time to study complex contracts before being expected to sign, and once we had a seat on the board they expected no input from us,” she says. “It took time to show the respective boards that we did have value to add and to earn their respect.”
The company recently exercised its right to realise its value in Masana Petroleum Solutions, an investment which it has held